Why America Sucks: The Average Hours per week of TV viewing is down!

It is with great sorrow I must report that today’s children are not watching enough television.  According to this news report out of Minnesota, the Nielsen ratings reported that kids between the age of 2 and 11 watched an average of 24 hours per week.  Shockingly, that is down from 28 hours in the mid-1970s.

No wonder our country is going to hell in a hand basket!  Our kids are watching four hours of less television per week that my generation.  That is just plain awful.  This is trend that must be reverse for the sake of all America!

The good news that is that television can still screw up your kids!  They just need to focus on what kind of television they watch.

The more violent the better!  A recent study says that the type of television (the quality of television) also affects the child’s development.  To no one’s big surprise, the preschool age children who switched from violent television to more educational shows were less aggressive and more kind than the control group.  In the study, the control group didn’t change their television viewing habits.  The study also reported that the control group and the healthy TV group reported watching slightly more TV after the year-long monitoring project.

But don’t despair about TV viewing going down, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s (2010) report stated that kids spend an average of 75 hours of media viewing per week.

They broke it down into the following:

The average kid sponges in 2.5 hours of music each day, almost five hours of TV and movies, three hours of Internet and video games, and just 38 minutes of old-fashioned reading.  Sadly, that figure didn’t include the hour and a half spent text messaging each day, and the half hour kids talk on the cell phone.

So if your kid isn’t watching good old fashion TV, then they are on the computer or Smartphone racking up those media hours!  Good for them!   Don’t let us down!

Sorry, this blog post is so short….my daughter needed to rot her brain by playing an online game for 8 hours.  I don’t want her to be below average so she is allowed to play her online game for at least six hours. Then I kick her off to watch TV.  It is all about balance here in my house.

Remember: There are no below average kids in my house!

That’s my worthless advice for today!  As always, your comments on my great parenting tips are always welcome!