Lumby, Catharine & Fine, Duncan
Why TV is Good for Kids: Raising 21st Century Children
Pan Macmillan, Sydney 2006
This book caught my eye at the library, and I borrowed it because about 20 years ago I remember my Mum reading a book called “The Plug-In Drug” which was all about how evil TV/marketing/Barbie/GI Joe really are. About this time the black-and-white TV was banned in our house for a few years, with the result that when we were out, my 3 siblings and I would stand glued to the spot, staring goggle-eyed at any colour TV within our line of sight (friends’ houses, electrical retailers…). We’re not scarred for life. Really.
Naturally, I was intrigued about what the authors of “Why TV is Good For Kids” would have to say – perhaps I could find evidence in here that my decision to allow my kids to watch ABC Kids and play with Barbies was not only OK, but good for them!
The first chapter is a vitriolic, generalised and spectacularly un-evidenced rant against: the 1950s (and how bad it was in every way), evangelical Christians (ie, people who love to oppress everybody else), George Pell (Roman Catholic archbishop), the media (who indiscriminately skew everything), the institution of marriage (which they claim was less popular than de facto relationships in the Middle Ages and thus it doesn’t matter that people choose to not marry now), etc.
Once Catharine and Duncan (who, it happens, are living in a de facto marriage) get that out of their system, you can really tell that they know more about analysing popular culture and TV. Duncan writes for children’s TV including Hi-5 and Catharine is a journalist.
Their main aim in the book is to identify what they call “panics”. That is, something takes hold of parents’, paediatricians’ and educators’ imaginations (thanks to the media), like the idea that watching hours of violent TV makes kids fat and violent, and everyone believes it. They then try to summarise what they claim to be “the best, broadest and most objective research” (p5) in order to myth bust these widely-believed fallacies.
The “panics” include: TV makes kids fat, violent and addicted to drugs later in life; marketing to children is evil because it makes girls prefer pink sparkly things and boys prefer guns; non-educational toys are trash; McDonald’s is doing incalculable harm to our children; modern education is producing kids who don’t know anything useful; boys are disadvantaged by our education system; kids are being sexualised too young and this is causing an epidemic of paedophilia; teenagers are having way too much sex too young; modern parents are too permissive and don’t discipline their kids; more young people are taking drugs; kids today don’t have any morals. These “myths” are then “busted”, some more convincingly than others.
The authors have this frustrating tendency to identify the “panic” and then sidestep the issue in order to have a rant about something that’s related but not quite addressing the issue itself. I get the feeling that when conceiving the idea for the book, Duncan and Catharine had this list of rants which they have previously aired in the company of like-minded friends at dinner parties and inner-city cafes with such articulateness. We probably all do this, true, but not everyone aspires to being published…take this attempt at being clever in a dinner-party-kind-of-way:
“Our sons have never expressed any interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction…(t)hough that may change if they get involved with the right wings of the Liberal or Labor parties…” (p 174)
Overall, the book reads a bit like a piece of broadsheet newspaper journalism – ie, facts, quotes and opinion gathered together and assembled into something publishable. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, really, it’s just an observation.
Towards the end of the book it becomes more obvious just how radically leftist the authors are. For instance, they claim that neither parents or society can stop teenagers from having sex (citing the statistic that 88% of teenagers who sign abstinence pledges go on to have mainly unprotected sex shortly thereafter). Their recommendation: sensible parents should have a stock of condoms available in the house so their unstoppably sexually active teenagers don’t get embarrassed asking for them. If we can’t stop young people from having premarital sex then at least we can minimise unwanted pregnancies and STDs, so the argument goes. So utilitarian, so obviously reasonable…so careful to not even mention the unavoidable pain of broken relationships as the result of sexual “freedom”.
Nevertheless, I did appreciate sections of the book which made me think a bit further. For instance, the idea of “class-based ideas of value”. That is,
“…the kind of thinking that says it’s wanton and perverted to feed your child a Big Mac, but it’s perfectly okay to let them eat a focaccia in an inner-city cafe…which, after all, is pretty much the same thing: processed meat, melted cheese, and pickles between two bits of bread…(t)he former is seen as a white-trash lunch, the latter as a cultural experience…the fat and salt content is often very similar.” (p154)
Or, in discussing the “panic” that kids these days aren’t being educated properly,
“In (Cardinal George Pell’s) address on education he blasted away at state school syllabuses for abandoning the great works of literature and for spending too much time on stories about ’sad and dysfunctional individuals and shattered families.’ Which left us puzzled about which Shakespeare play Dr Pell thinks young people should study. It can’t be Romeo and Juliet…King Lear…(c)an’t be the sonnets…(w)hat this disjuncture shows is that there are, in fact, two Shakespeares. There’s Shakespeare the author of some of the most hauntingly brilliant plays and poetry ever written; and there’s Shakespeare the Guardian of Western Civilisation.” (p184)
However I think the best bits of the book are where Catharine and Duncan champion the cause of the underprivileged. This is what our materialistic, hedonistic society needs to hear – how easy is it to forget those we don’t wish to think about? Here’s a couple of quotes I can echo:
“…(L)et’s get real about who’s really missing out when it comes to education. It’s not middle-class kids, it’s not boys as a group, it’s not English students taught by postmodernists. All the research still shows that it’s children who come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds who are least likely to finish school and least likely to achieve academically. So if we’re going to get agitated about anything, we think Australians should be saving up all that energy for something worth worrying about: equality in educational opportunity.” (p216)
“The big problem in our world today isn’t the exposure middle-class kids have to ads for McDonald’s, Barbie dolls or XBoxes. It’s the lack of access other children have to different experiences of culture of any kind. Rather than focusing our energy and attention on banning junk-food ads or condemning Nintendo or Nickelodeon, people with the energy and power ought to be getting outraged about the lack of funding for eduction in our poorest communities.” (p175)
Noting of course that “the big problem in our world today” actually isn’t that underprivileged children don’t have access to cultural experiences. But the vibe is right.
I was sad that the authors never got around to showing how, exactly, TV is good for kids – a not unreasonable expectation, I would argue, given the title of the book.
So there you go. Shortly after writing this review, I came across a letter in the Sydney Morning Herald (19 November 2007) and I quote:
“…I have a word for the belief that the televisual is as valuable as getting out and about and moving in, smelling, touching, tasting, looking at and listening to what’s going on around us. It’s ” lumbyism”, after Catharine Lumby, who bangs on about how it is fine to sit your kids in front of the TV and how all these studies (from which she doesn’t offer any concrete examples) have shown that it’s fine and indeed educational. She seems to be forgetting that she and her husband are extremely well-educated, upper-middle class parents who probably interact with their children intelligently about what they’re viewing. What about the others? The increasing numbers of people who are plugging their children in and opting out of the difficult and exciting work and play of being parents?…” Jane Sloan, Potts Point
But I think one day I might write a book titled “Why TV Preserves the Sanity of Most Classes of Parents In Most of the Developed World With Children Under 5″. Watch this space 
