Mike
Carruthers:
It's quite common today for young children to have a television in their bedroom,
yet…
Susan
Jacoby:
If children under six have a TV in their bedrooms they
are: 1) Less likely to read than other children: 2) Mre likely to smoke later
on, and: 3) More likely to be obese. Susan
Jacoby, author of the book The
Age of American Unreason… First
of all, studies large studies show again that children who watch video (not just
TV but video) more than two hours a day - their vocabulary develops later, they
have less vocabulary, they're less likely to read. This
is all part of what Susan sees as a dumbing down of America. Listen to this statistic
about people who read books… The
National Endowment for the Arts issued a study, which says, of Americans under
44 years old (older people read more), of Americans under 44, fewer than half
read a single book last year - any book. So,
how do we combat this problem? There's
one thing that's really encouraged me. I have gotten literally thousands of emails
from parents of young children and this suggests to me that more people are worried
about this than I thought were. One way you can combat this - you have to start;
first of all, with being conscious of how you spend your own time and what you
have your children spend time on. At
somethingyoushouldknow.net
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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