Things You Can Read had an interesting post on television and reading—and how it affects children’s development. One of the articles to which the post points is to a paper by Dr. Susan R. Johnson, a pediatrician specializing in children’s behavior and development. I have to say I did find that she made several somewhat terrifying points in “Strangers in Our Homes: TV and Our Children’s Minds” (do keep in mind that I am prejudiced toward reading *grin*).

Image Credit: The American Kid

Terrifying to a parent in that the paper makes some time-consuming suggestions in as much as we tend to use TV to keep the kids quiet and out of our hair and terrifying in the points Johnson makes.

One point that stood out to me in particular was about imagination. That in reading, a child must exercise their mind and create pictures from the words s/he reads while television fills in all the pictures and doesn’t require any real thought.

This reminded me of one of my childhood books that I recently mentioned in my post “Back from the Grave”. A story about a little girl who played nurse to wounded animals. It so inspired me that I went around the neighborhood looking for anything at all to play nurse with. I can’t imagine that watching a program about the same little girl would have inspired me. I doubt very much that I would still remember that TV program decades later.

Study finds developmental difficulties in some children

An MSNBC news article mostly rehashes what is fairly common knowledge about television versus reading and our kids, but it starts with an excellent point which could impact how easily they learn in school, that “Very young children who live in homes where the television is on most of the time may have more trouble learning how to read than other kids their age, according to a study of media habits of children up to 6 years old.”