They'd rather see Scooby Doo or Spongebob than Daddy talking about the latest Wall Street Journal editorial. You do what you have to do to get your kids ready for school.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The claim that SpongeBob makes your child dumber is a causal claim. If you do X, Y will happen. To prove that, you'd have to show that if you forced the children in the no-TV households to watch SpongeBob and changed nothing else about their lives, they would do worse in school.
Kids cannot follow stories. They don't know what the hell is going on in a cartoon. They like to see funny visual things happening.
My kids are fanatical about 'Scooby-Doo', and I think that the creators of 'Scooby-Doo' somehow tripped across some kind of magical hypnotic formula that lures children. It's far more fascinating to them than anything else on the air.
Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it's a good thing they'll be reading a newspaper on a screen.
Kids are no longer interested in reading comic books; they've got television and the electronic games that they can bury themselves in like ostriches. They don't have to pay attention to what's going on in the world around them.
I don't think it's realistic to say kids shouldn't watch any TV. I just wish the shows would be better. And that kids would watch less. Get out there and do things, kids! Don't become couch potatoes!
'Sesame Street' was a pioneering educational T.V. show, intended to help underprivileged children. But even those of us middle-class kids spoilt for pedagogical choice couldn't get enough of it.
Me personally, I wouldn't put my kids on television. But to each his own.
I don't think of cartoons or comics as being for kids.
Kids aren't growing up with a sense of television as the aspirational place for their ideas.