The ruling body for French television has banned broadcasting of channels aimed at viewers under the age of three years old, according to the Associated Press.
“Television viewing hurts the development of children under 3 years old and poses a certain number of risks, encouraging passivity, slow language acquisition, over-excitedness, troubles with sleep and concentration as well as dependence on screens,” the ruling said.
I don’t have any children, but generally when I think of this I think of some of the earliest Peanuts comic strips from Charles Schultz (may he rest in peace) where a baby Linus sits on the floor about a foot from the television mesmerized in a trance with eyes as wide as saucers. I believe that Schultz was in alignment with the French TV governance and that it was a subtle way for him to express how appauled he was that people used TVs as baby-sitters. It just took forty years or so for a governing body to go on record agreeing with him.
I’m honstly not really sure what to think on this subject, so I’ll leave it for those with children to chime in. But I found the ban pretty fascinating.
Despite what I feel are fairly superior Googling skills, I couldn’t find an image of the baby Linus in front of the TV, but here’s an older Linus in a position not wholly unknown to me (image via kera.org)
This sounds a little totalitarian to me.
What are they going to do: come into people's home and check to be sure that babies aren't in the room when the TV is on?
Or are they going to do something more Orwellean and install cameras in everyone's home to watch what is going on?
Big Brother is Watching!
Anglecrest, I believe the ban is on broadcasting programming *designed* for babies, and not a ban on putting babies in view of TVs.
Robert
Actually, that seems worse to me. People are going to use TV as a baby sitter no matter what!
Wouldn't you rather have them watching age appropriate content?
My opinion is that Nielsen should stop issuing ratings statistics for kids ages 2-5. It's not appropriate for kids that age to be targeted by marketers.
I think the evidence on the effect of very young kids watching TV is inconclusive at best. I'm not at all convinced that the act of watching TV itself is necessarily a bad thing, and in moderation it can actually be useful. It's the commercialization that I think is troubling.
If we stop issuing ratings for toddler-age kids we can't stop marketers from continuing to target them, but at least we can say that as an industry we don't acknowledge three year olds as part of a consumer marketplace. I think that would be a healthy step.
I also recognize the chances of this happening are about equal to the chances of me swimming from New York to Australia.