Infectious Ideas
I was reminded this past weekend of a bit of information I stored away in my brain nearly forty years ago. I was in graduate school working as a research assistant and was assigned to gather behavioral research reports on whether and how watching television and movies affected how people think about things. This one area of study was about children and concluded that children who watch TV without interaction with their parents or adult caretakers tend to take in whatever they watch as solid information about how the world works. Conversely, the more the child interacts with trusted adults while watching, as in discussing what they are seeing, asking questions, being asked things like “do you think that is real?,” or “what do you think about that?,” the better the child is able to sort what is real and true from what is not.
At the same time as I stored that bit of info and the years leading up to it, it was common to hear people refer to a television as a “one-eyed babysitter.” Keep in mind that fifty years ago, about half of televisions in American homes were black-and-white and half were color, and even a huge TV would be considered quite small by today’s standards. And grainy, did I mention grainy? And most people had maybe three or four broadcast channels and that was it—no “cable” and certainly nothing on-demand. But still, as primitive as that all sounds, if your kids were driving you crazy, you could turn on that TV and find something that would keep at least some of them fixated for a little while. It occurs to me that I never hear that phrase any more, even though we have one-eyed babysitters everywhere now—most of us carry one on our persons at all times.
With the ubiquity of one-eyed babysitters, how could anyone be sure to at least be available to interact with their kids while they are watching? That defeats the purpose, does it not? You hand your phone to your kids (or grandkids) so you can have a few minutes to yourself to be able to think or complete a task.
This all started because of a nearly-eight-year-old who has always loved to cook and says she wants to be a chef when she grows up suddenly developing a case of the “icks” over touching food with bare (clean) hands. Eventually her parents and I figured out that some of the people on the cooking shows she loves to watch are starting to wear gloves all the time. I have noticed this trend with cooking “influencers” on social media, too, in response to pressure from commenters. The people with the “icks” are a bunch of very squeaky wheels. Those folks would starve if they knew how much skin contact was made with every morsel of food that comes in their prepared meals. In the end, we did our best to provide the aforementioned child a reality check on the chef/gloves issue and then encouraged her to use her considerable brainpower to think things through instead of simply adopting or believing what she sees in one screen or another. Does she believe us? Will she get over her “icks” infection? I sure hope so. I would hate for something the one-eyed babysitter showed her to steal her joy. The entire episode was a reality check for this granny on just how easily and heavily influenced children, all of us really, are by our screens. I wish we all had someone standing by to help us filter and think through what we see and hear.