The Television-Free Experiment

[Lyric]

I have a seven-year old child--I'll call him OktoberKid. He's something of an anomaly in American society, because he has been only minimally exposed to television advertising. This has had an amazing effect, and I wanted to share it with you all, because I think it's worth talking about.

We had cable TV service for the first 2 years after my son was born. He watched TV now and then, although I was always careful to limit his viewing to the "kid's shows"--Mr. Rogers reruns, Sesame Street, Teletubbies, Blue's Clues, etc. One day I was washing dishes while my 2-year old son was watching TV, and I heard him singing along to a commercial. That stopped me cold, and made me think long and hard about how commercials and advertising affect children. I started reading about it, and found lots of disturbing information about how companies deliberately target small children with their commercials, in order to influence the buying habits of their parents. The thought of some corporation *using* my kid like that made me sick. We decided to cancel our cable TV service, and since that day, my child has been exposed to commercials and television advertising only in small doses--when visiting family members at the holidays, sometimes for a few minutes in a waiting room, or briefly during a visit with a friend. We still watch movies on DVD here at home, and we have purchased two television shows in DVD format (The West Wing and Lost) but the only "commercials" on those are previews for other movies.

The effect of this is nothing short of astonishing. For example--he plays outside every single day, for hours at a time. When he makes his Christmas list, the vast majority of the things he asks for have nothing to do with licensed characters--he wants a basketball, a scooter, an aquarium, new crayons and paint, and "trucks"--a generic term for anything with wheels. He never cries or whines or begs for toys that "all the cool kids have". That actually surprised me at first, because I figured that the other kids at school would be the ones putting that pressure on him to have the "coolest toys", but that hasn't happened. Could it be that the commercials are largely responsible for convincing kids that they simply cannot live without the "latest thing"? We blame peer pressure, and I'm sure that's a small part of it, but I no longer agree that pressure from peers is the greatest factor. Not by a long shot.

Maybe I'm biased because he's *my* son, but after interacting with his classmates for three years now in his small community school, I have noticed that there is a significant difference between my son and the other children in his class. He complains less. He engages more. He seems a lot more interested in the world outside of his neighborhood, and a lot less interested in what's "trendy" and what isn't. He doesn't throw tantrums in department stores because he wants the latest heavily-marketed toy. He likes "traditional" toys, and things that he can create with--especially paint.

All in all, I seem to have a kid who's less cranky, less whiny, healthier, more active, and a lot happier and brighter than the other kids in our neighborhood and in his class. The only real difference between my son and those other children is the lack of television programming, and more specifically, television commercials.

Maybe Americans are letting corporations exert *far* too much influence on the minds of their children. Perhaps it's time to break them out of the corporate grip, and let the de-programming (no pun intended) begin.

It's something to consider.