It may well be true that the attitudes depicted on television seep into the minds of the people who habitually watch the shows that promote those attitudes. I'm sure that there is research out there somewhere that links many commonly held attitudes with attitude that are promoted in the various television shows but these are not the real dangers of television to our society.



The real dangers of television are that it is addictive and that it tends to stop social interaction in the home.

Try this simple experiment. Keep the television set turned off and get a group of people together in the room where the television set is. Those people will start talking and interacting. Now turn the television on. You will soon find that the talking stops and people start watching the television, regardless of what is being telecast.

Television is an addictive, non interactive media. It stops people doing other, far healthier, more life enhancing things.

The average American watches television for over four hours per day. That's 4 hours per day of sitting around like a vegetable, not using your brain and not doing anything to actually enhance your life.

Television watching has greatly reduced the amount of reading that people doing. Yet one of the biggest differences between people who have a successful, happy life compared to those who don't is that the successful, happy people read a lot more that those who are unsuccessful or unhappy.

Television greatly reduces the amount of social interaction within a family. I was fortunate enough to be brought up in a home that did not have television for most of my childhood. After dinner the family would sit around talking to each other or play games such as cards. These socially interactive activities are far better for developing healthy, happy mind sets than sitting mindlessly in front of a TV.

Over fifty percent of American homes have three or more TV's. The amount of time that at least one TV is turned on in the average American home is 7 hours 40 minutes per day. Forty five percent of American parents with young children say that they regularly use television as a means of occupying the child so that the parent can be doing something else.

Children are watching television for hours every day yet when research is done on the amount of time parents are having meaningful conversations with their young children we discover that it is 38.5 minutes per week on average. That's less than 6 minutes per day. In fact 54% of children between the ages of 4 and 6 say that they would rather watch TV then spend time with their father.

The real danger of television is that it takes away the valuable human interaction from families and relationships and replaces it with not interactive, passive TV watching.

I challenge you to turn all TV's off in your house and leave them off for a month and then rediscover the human side of life. I did this and now we no longer have a television in the house and our lives are so much better for it.