Television...a Potent Influence in Our Lives

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For all the benefits that TV brings us when
we are unable to go out for entertainment



Television has become a potent influence in our lives. It affects our attitudes as well as the clothes that we buy. Its influence is so widespread that it even affects our choice of foods. Television was for entertainment, but its magic has cast a spell over our life-style. It is recently that we have become aware of how pervasive a force it is in our lives. when we do not try to control it, we experience lethargy and inertia. This is because television is omnipresent in our lives. We cannot go anywhere without experiencing its message. It sugar-coats our dreams and drain our energies.

Television can provide entertainment and information, but for the growing mind it can also contribute to a distorted sense of reality. During the developmental years, your child will learn about the world by looking at things and events  and acting upon them. In this intercourse with life's events, your child will think about what he has experienced and will respond with emotion to the results. At all times, his visual system will guide his actions and will respond to the feelings he attaches to them. This intersaction between what he sees, how he acts upon it and how he feels about what he perceives develops into the perceptual filters that guide his future behaviour. In each of these real-life encounters he has responded by choice and then analyzed the results. It is this act of participation which is the key to healthy growth.

Entering School: The Skill of Sitting

The big day arrives and your child is off to school. It is interesting how frequently we have children start formal education at age seven. They appear ready to learn at about that age- at least formally. They like to be part of a group. They look up to authority figures and absorb what authority figures have to say.

Children entering school must be able to balance their bodies comfortably. This involves an integration between their balance mechanism and their visual attention mechanism. You have seen this grow over the years so that they can sit and watch without being pulled into the action by what they are watching. The skill of sitting in a balanced posture, oriented to a learning situation and ready to absorb information, depends on the ability to balance the body while sitting and listening, reading and writing. This is the same reciprocal motor skill that the children have developed over the last seven years. It started with rolling over and progressed to creeping and walking and finally demonstrated itself when they could alternate their feet while walking down the stairs without help or demonstrated the ability to skip.

What the child really demonstrated is the reciprocal control of opposite actions of the nervous system and the muscles that position the body. They coordinate the left-side muscles with the right-side muscles, front with back, the visual cues of being upright with the postural cues of being upright. All of these coordinated movements are, we hope, skillfully developed so that unconscious effort needed to sustain coordination. If this is the case, then the child is posturally orientated to the task with minimal distraction. and is able to pay full attention to what is being presented.