Reading vs Television

Has reading taken a back seat to watching TV?  Many people think it has with the age of technology and video games.  It seems harder to get our kids to read a book over the other choices that are easier.  Reading books works the mind more than mindlessly sitting and watching something on TV.  According to one study, reading makes us smarter by increasing our vocabulary, boosting our general knowledge and by keeping our ability to reason and our memory in tact as we mature.  

With the busyness of life too many parents are using the TV as a baby sitter, instead of spending quality time with them and teaching them habits like reading.  Some believe that the constant watching of TV and the increased number of commercials interrupting the programs add to creating ADD in children.  When many parents were growing up there weren’t as many choices of channels to watch, four or five at the most.  Now with cable and satellite, children have 300-500 channels of things to choose from allowing them to spend much more time finding something they would like to watch and with a lot more chance of undesirable programming.  

Children and adolescents watch anywhere from 22 to 28 hours per week of TV.  What would they be like spending the same amount of time reading good books?  As parents, you have the responsibility to be involved in your children’s lives by screening how much and what they watch each week.  Knowing that reading books makes our children smarter, why wouldn’t we enforce more of that at an early age?  If children are developing these habits early on, they won’t complain as much when they get older.  Who knows, they may even acquire a desire to read more than wasting time on the old mindless box.