On average, we spend 12 years of our lives watching television. By the age of six, a child has already spent one whole year in front of the TV.
Television is responsible for a wide range of child health and development issues — it may be a bigger factor in obesity than either diet or exercise. It’s also implicated in half of all violent crime.
These aren’t the views of cranks or crackpots — they’re the results of serious social research. One major study in the Journal of the American Medical Association came to the stark conclusion that ‘If… television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults. Violent crime would be half of what it is.’ And the psychologist Aric Sigman says that television ‘has unleashed a worldwide cultural force equalled in history only by religion.’
