Bijaya Bista

ENGL 1100

Expository essay

The amount of time, the children are watching a television has dramatically increased over the time resulting the children to become more inactive and less creative. Children enjoy most of the things that they see in the televisions and they tend to believe whatever they saw and heard to be true. Meanwhile, the television commercials and other programs are directly targeting children and exploiting them. They are persuaded through false information or engaging characters to watch televisions again and again and they are also taught about nagging tactics to compel their parents to let them watch and satisfy their needs. Journalist Eric Schlosser, in his incisive account wrote about how children are spending most of their time. He states, “The typical child now spends about twenty-one hours a week watching television - roughly one and a half months of TV every year……...About one-quarter of the American children between the ages of two and five have a TV in their room.” Schlosser believes that the number of television programs and commercials targeted directly towards children has been significantly increasing that they are spending more and more time watching televisions and as a result are becoming more inactive and less creative. Avoiding commercials and regulating time to watch televisions would decrease the amount of time a child spends on watching television.

In this modern, technological and competitive world, everybody is busy in certain things. Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”, which is very true and can be related to present context. The world is being very competitive and only those that struggle and win fit well. And obviously, the parents are not being able to give enough time to their children also and each other that is deteriorating the family bonding. They are working more and hard to fulfill the materialistic needs of their children and themselves. Moreover, they seek for certain ways to keep their children busy so that they can be free for themselves. Allowing children to watch television is the most common way to do so. They let their children to watch television most of the time. Some parents are not even unaware about how much their children are spending their time on television. Mostly, children watch cartoons on television and very soon they are addicted to those cartoons. Once addicted, they will be willing to skip anything, even their food to watch their favorite cartoons. And due to the number of cartoons there are, the list of their favorite cartoons is large. As I have seen, these days’ children often tend to sleep and wake up late as trying to finish watching the cartoons. It is not only killing their time, but also hampering their creativities and bonding. Due to lack of enough time to stay, talk and share, the family bonding weakens as a result, sometime the structure of the family dismantles. Author Marie Winn on her book, “Television: The Plug-in Drug states “Of course, families today still do things together at times: ……But their ordinary life together is diminished…… and the parents have their peaceful dinner together.” Winn mentions that today the amount of time a family spends together to talk about each other, share new ideas, plans, and progresses, express the feeling of love, care and affection have diminished.

On the other hand, “the television companies are also broadcasting advertising targeted directly at children got twenty-four hours a day and 80 percent of all television viewing by kids are cartoons” as mentioned by Schlosser. The commercials are compelling children to constantly nag their parents and fulfill their needs. And the nagging tactics are also taught to children as Schlosser states “James U. McNeal “teaches children how to nag their parents in his book Kids as Customers (1992).”

Children are learning things that will benefit them for a while rather than that will be forever helpful and effective. The base of the children weakens if they are let to watch television all the time besides encouraging them to be engage in learning and doing creative works. Not only, it will waste their time but also make them uncompetitive, dependent and unmanageable in both present and future. Surprisingly, children, these days have very less IQ than what the children of the earlier time used to have when they would be give very less or no time for television. They would play, learn and share together in the natural environment, unlike today where everybody is busy in their digital worlds. As it is said, “Time is more precious than Gold”. We have to know the value of time and keep track of what we are doing or what we are letting others to do and hence, use the time effectively because “Time and Tide waits for none.”