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There are over 4000 studies that have been done on the effect of TV on children; some of these are very disturbing. Did you know that the average time a parent spends having meaningful conversation with their child in a week is 3.5 minutes? Also, did you know that the average child spends 1,680 minutes a week watching TV? Seventy percent of all day-care centers use television. Fifty four percent of children age 4-6 when asked if they would rather spend time with their fathers or watch television, chose television. The average kid spends 900 hours a year in school and 1500 hours a year watching TV. Just a few more statistics before we move on to the effects of these. An 18 year old high school student has witnessed 200,000 violent acts on TV, and an elementary student will have seen 8,000 murders. The average child will watch 20,000 commercials a year, while the number one spender in youth advertisement is fast food. Fifty four percent of the shows on TV are devoted to crime. Fifty nine percent of Americans can name the Three Stoogies, while only 17 percent can name at least 3 Supreme Court justices.These statistics should disturb you. Millions of Americans are so hooked on television that they fit the criteria for substance abuse as defined in the official psychiatric manual, according to Rutgers University psychologist and TV-Free America board member Robert Kubey. Heavy TV viewers exhibit five dependency symptoms, two more than necessary to arrive at a clinical diagnosis of substance abuse. These include: 1) using TV as a sedative; 2) indiscriminate viewing; 3) feeling loss of control while viewing; 4) feeling angry with oneself for watching too much; 5) inability to stop watching; and 6) feeling miserable when kept from watching. The power that TV has over an individual’s thought process is incredible.The United States is becoming or has become a nation raised by the TV. Not only does it eventually start to control the thoughts of a person by controlling most or all of the information they see, it is also terrible for one’s health. A National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey released in October 1995 found 4.7 million children between the ages of 6-17 (11% of this age group) to be severely overweight, more than twice the rate during the 1960′s. The main culprits: inactivity (these same children average more than 22 hours of television-viewing a week) and a high-calorie diet. A 1991 study showed that there were an average of 200 junk food ads in four hours of children’s Saturday morning cartoons. According to William H. Deitz, pediatrician and prominent obesity expert at Tufts University School of Medicine, “The easiest way to reduce inactivity is to turn off the TV set. Almost anything else uses more energy than watching TV.”

Children are not the only Americans suffering from weight problems; one-third of American adults are overweight. According to an American Journal of Public Health study, an adult who watches three hours of TV a day is far more likely to be obese than an adult who watches less than one hour.

Sometimes the problem is not too much weight, but too little. Seventy-five percent of American women believe they are too fat, an image problem that often leads to bulimia or anorexia. Sound strange? Not when one takes into account that female models and actresses are 23 percent thinner than the average woman and thinner than 95 percent of the female population.