TELEVISION
by Esther Leisher
In a Waldorf study group someone commented that she grew up without TV
and felt that it is important socially for a child to at least watch TV occasionally.
I think it's a valid statement, depending on the age of the child, though each
person is going to see it differently.
We didn't have a TV set in our house until the kids were teenagers. I see now
that we could have had a TV set if we had kept it put away. If it lived in a
closet to be brought out on Sunday nights for a nature program, it could have
become a part of the rhythm of the week. The children would have felt more
culturally included because even if we didn't watch much TV, we at least
owned one.
Of course you have to evaluate each situation. I reconsidered television when
Paul, the youngest, turned 12 and received enough money to buy a used TV.
He asked if he could get one, and I agreed to that. It seemed the right thing to
do in his social situation, and Laurel, 2-1/2 years older, commented that there
were two programs everyone talked about and to feel a part of a group they
needed to watch those two programs. That sounded sensible to me.
Fortunately Paul was old enough to realize almost immediately (after lots of
indiscriminate TV watching) that most of the stuff on TV was trash. And even
if he had not noticed, he did have a childhood that nurtured sensitivity to beauty
and meaning. The subtler, higher senses had already had a chance to
develop, senses that might be damaged by media. At his age, with his
personality, I did not feel that TV was going to hurt him.
Media in all its forms--TV, tapes, computers--is a big question, especially in
early childhood. Probably the less the better because the more subtle human
senses can be blunted: the sense for meaningful language; the sense of the
presence of another human being; etc. But that is something you would have
to know intuitively. What is right for your own children, for your particular
family?
Leontyne Price became one of the greatest modern opera singers partly
because her mother constantly played records of operas. From earliest
childhood Leontyne was listening and singing along. It did not damage her
musical ear, and there would have been nowhere else in her life where she
would have encountered that kind of singing. The phonograph records, it
seems to me, were a necessary part of her destiny. Generalized rules
have to be adapted to actual lives.
When my children were younger, our house was very quiet except for our own
activities. No TV, no radio, no computer. However, I did not reject every
mechanically reproduced form of communication. They heard recorded music
at times and listened to some stories on tape. The compensation was that we
had live music in our house, and I read to them often and for long periods.
The two younger ones also heard first-hand stories and, for me, telling or
making up those stories was so much fun that, at 64,
I am still making up magical stories just for myself.
Of course we sang, too and not just children's songs. You can make up a song
for anything. "Has anyone seen my jacket?'' "I think you left it in the car."
-- all sung in an operatic voice or like a Gregorian chant. I did not feel that, in
the scale of things, small amounts of canned music and recorded stories were
wrong for us.
I would like to hear other people's thoughts about this. How have you decided
to approach this with your own family? --Esther Leisher
Esther, our family is just begun, and over-exposure to TV is something I am deeply concerned about for my infant daughter. Our first step is to turn off the satellite TV feed (or cable). We will replace it with an antenna so that we can still view the excellent programs on our local public television station on occasion.
I got a big smile, reading about how your family sings just about anything. We do that here in our house as well, and it's a tradition of sorts, passed down through several generations of my family. Thank you for reminding me of how special these seemingly silly things can be.