SO DEMANDING: Single or childless people can attest to the transformation that often overtakes their friends when they have kids � an overwhelming urge to update you on their latest parenting adventures that�s both obsessive and boring that can only partially be blamed on a chronic sleep deficiency that medical textbooks tell us can lead to psychosis.
During the first few months of their baby�s life, parents are often grateful for those late night moments when they can unwind in front of the tube with baby asleep on their shoulder. However, as soon as it�s obvious that Junior has noticed the TV�s magic diorama, the anxiety begins. An anxiety prompted by studies -- printed monthly in every parenting magazine -- informing us that just three hours of TV-watching a week during the first two years of a child�s life will irrevocably damage their chances of getting a scholarship to Yale law school.
These studies get trotted out on cue in a piece by Joanna Weiss in Sunday�s Boston Globe, but only after the writer gets anxious over the much harder to quantify effect that DVRs and video-on-demand will have on vulnerable young minds. Weiss begins by waxing nostalgic for the TV of her youth -- a life lived �beholden to the television schedule,� where she had to watch what was on, only when it was on, and had to suffer through Charlie�s Angels reruns after school, because she probably didn�t have a few hundred cable channels to choose from or a hard drive full of TiVo�d shows.
What Weiss seems to have forgotten is that this Edenic world flat-out sucked � I know because I was there too. Given the choice between trawling up and down the vast expanse of digital cable until I find something to kill an hour or two � usually the Military Channel or Alton Brown touring diners and truck stops on Food � and a quick circuit of less than a dozen channels that inevitably leads to The Love Boat, I�ll take the former.
Weiss recounts the awkward conversation she has with her four-year-old whenever she asks to see something that isn�t either on the DVR�s hard drive or available on demand. I�ve had that conversation, which Weiss doesn�t seem to be recognize as an expression of a child�s concept of the eternal now. Time and all its existential implications will impress itself soon enough on her child�s mind. Nonetheless, Weiss worries that her child is �missing something if she isn't forced to wait for precisely what she wants.�
I sometimes think that this inevitable parental recourse to wailing �What about the children?� has been as effective a form of non-pharmaceutical birth control for the childless as kids-eat-for-free nights at restaurants. Weiss� worries that being able to pause a show or choose what you want to watch when you want is only valid if you think that bookmarks and libraries have made reading an activity full of potentially damaging side effects. And if you�re so worried, maybe now is the time to go all Amish and kick the TV to the curb � if you dare.
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