When television manufacturers started fitting their products with a child-lock option, it was proof enough of the universality of parents' fears that left to itself the telly could take a child hostage for life. They'd heard sufficient truth and hearsay about the damaging effects of the boob tube - how it would turn their kids blind or deaf or violent, socially dwarfed or materialistic, obese or sociopathic or willing candidates to reality shows - and they vowed to quarantine their kids from TV for as long as they had the upper hand (or till about age one in these times).At the playground you'd hear proud mums clucking about turning the TV on only after their child was in bed, or out with the nanny; then there were those extremists who claimed not to own a TV at all. Lately, however, their declarations have sunk to a lower note of absolution.
Parents now tell you the telly isn't such a bad chapafter all. They deploy multiple syllables like 'preset limits', 'qualityviewing' and 'edutainment'. And just to drive the point home, they throwCBeebies at you.
"I let Mrinal watch only this channel," says AjantaKriplani, a stay-home mum in Delhi about the TV habits of her one-year-old.
Shegoes on to enumerate the merits of the BBC children's channel, foremost amongwhich are its repudiation of violence and its laudable use of colour, rhythm andspeech to cultivate a child's cognitive and language skills. More importantly,she is pleased that it does not visually depict and differentiate its characterson the stereotypical lines of 'good' and 'bad'. Parents have begun to payattention to these things.
Ajanta Kriplani sits her tot before thetelly, and for an hour every morning Mrinal stays transfixed to shows thatparade puppets, clay figures, animation robots, craft lessons, and even yoga andcalisthenics for pre-schoolers. While Mrinal is too young to fill out aquestionnaire as to the effectiveness of this programming, her mother says shesees the proof. "CBeebies has a show called Boogie Beebies, where children aretaken through a song-and-dance routine. Mrinal dances to that. I'm alsoconfident she'll develop good language skills in the long run since thevoiceovers on this channel have British English diction. If I let her watch someof the local children's channels, she might either speak with a Japanese slantor an Indian effect," says Kriplani with some scorn.
It may astonish some that parents are the new touts of TV, but these people are quick to point out they're not among those hardened folk who sit their kids before the box for endless hours. No, this lot claims to employ TV as a constructive medium of learning, harnessing its audio-visual features for supplementary education. While instructional DVDs have been around for some time, DTH (a cheaper option) has now wised up to the act. They know minors are a major market. What's better, they have parental consent.
A new entrant on screen is Fox's BabyTV,created for children under three. The catch-points of this channel, Fox says,are zero advertisements; a slow pace of narrative to keep up with learning andcomprehension rates; short-form episodes to match the mercurial attention spanof a toddler; repetition to establish learning and unaggressive, simplifiedcontent. Their website, babytv.com, is a sort of handbook for parents. Unlikemost channels that only supply TV schedules and games, or peddle merchandise,this one takes the trouble to tutor parents on the developmental qualities ofeach programme - it tells you which serials build creative thought and whichones hone symbolic thought, how to reiterate a message off screen through gamesand exercises, and why it's important to watch the channel with your child. SaysKeertan Adyanthaya, managing director, Fox International Channels, "Researchshows that even the youngest child in the house is exposed to TV, videos and thecomputer at high volumes. BabyTV's mission is to make screen media a healthypart of family life."
A journalist admits that she allows hertwo-year-old son to watch an hour of Animal Planet and CBeebies every nightbefore bed. "He has actually learnt to identify animals this way," she says. Sheopted for these channels over the more violent and nonsensical shows on otherchannels. "I believe television has special advantages over books, being moredynamic and audio-visual. It can take you places and shows you things youotherwise have no access to. I can't introduce my son to penguins at the cityzoo," she points out.
But it's not as if books have been given theboot for the box; most parents still believe they are the better educator. Thetelevision only compounds the learning experience, a 'value add-on' they insist.One suspects, however, the TV has lately curried such favour because it stillallows parents an hour of kid-free relief, only this time with the guiltlessconviction that the baby's getting an education. A book could need a reader, andfor children under three or four, the reader is the care-giver. Perhaps thisexplains why self-reading, battery-operated and e-books have become popular withparents, who can leave a toggle switch and a carnival of lights and buttons toconvey the contents to the child, with minimal need for assistiveintervention.
DTH operators are not lost to the educative (andparallel commercial) opportunities of tutor TV. Almost everyone in the bigleague holds out a digital candy bar to children and parents. And of the lot,Tata Sky is expert at this seduction. Its interactive suite offers threeedutainment services called Active Wizkids, Active Stories and Active Learningthat target the pre-school to primary group. "The Tata Sky interactiveeducational services have been designed using syllabus-driven content developedwith the help of leading educationists in India," says Vikram Mehra, chiefmarketing officer, Tata Sky, through an email. Every parent wants anintellectual or artistic wunderkind, and they're enlisting every device short ofthe toaster to help. Whatever else they're capable of, DTH draws likeedutainment packages manage to wean children off idiotic and sadistic cartoons;it's another question whether they are able instructors. Subranshu Sengupta, abanker from Kolkata, argues that they are. "The interactivity of such servicesmakes my daughter Sagarika responsive and engages her more actively than one-wayshows that demand passivity," he says. "We subscribed to Tata Sky's ActiveLearning Channel when she was seven, and she has learnt much of her vocabularyand diction, maths, and even geography, science and history through the channel.There are even stories from Indian history and culture read out aloud." But hegoes on to say that the small screen as a proxy educator can't hold a candle topersonal attention given to a child. "We still teach Sagarika throughconventional media like books and toys. And we intend to buy her encyclopediasand Tell Me Whys, no matter how informed or expressive TV is."
Butlife's not just an acquisition of facts and information; it's also about theassimilation of etiquette, ethics and empathy. Surprisingly, there's good ol' TVdoling out Sunday School advice as well. Two-and-a-half-year-old JenniferPhillips is a precocious pre-schooler who can pick out most of the scale insectsin her box (including 'caperpillar' ),knows her rhymes, colours and numbers andcan tack together a sentence quite correctly. Her mother Jean imputes thisequally to both TV and books. Now Jennifer's learning about obedience,assistance, truth and sharing from her favourite shows on CBeebies andNickelodeon. "We were walking on the pavement and she refused to hold my hand.Then I reminded her how Brownie Bear held her mother's hand on the street, andmaking that association, Jen took my hand," says Jean.
Organisededucation has bought the sales pitch too. Even as pre-schools and schools haveordered their televisions in bulk and have assigned hours of informative viewingevery week (Tata Sky's educational pack is farmed out to over 800 schools in thecountry),some educationists are eyeing the trend warily. Kavita Anand is theexecutive director at Shishuvan, an off-kilter school in Mumbai. She admits toscepticism about how much children are actually learning from the television."In America, Sesame Street was touted as the big thing that taught children tospeak English. You can call it fascination or hypnosis, where children are takenin by the colour and movement of images. It is not an interactive medium, and Iam dead against anything that causes a child to sit passively before it," shesays. "I think the parents who advocate the television as a means of educationonly justify their own unwillingness to take kids out to the park or otherinteractive areas of learning. Even so-called interactive services are stilllimited to the pressing of buttons on a remote - they don't involve anotherhuman being and are not natural. I know that's not learning - learning is abouttouching, smelling and tasting in addition to hearing and seeing. Then again,I'm not sure how much radiation from these devices is good to have childrenexposed to from an early age," she cautions. 'Early' is an elasticinterpretation of time, and some parents begin their teleducation from the timetheir offspring can sit without support. What starts as a meal-time distractioncan threaten to grow insidiously into a chronic addiction, and 'constructive'viewing can easily corrupt with the turn of a channel, which undoubtedly, atelly child will eventually get around to. "It all begins with the exaggeratedenthusiasm of parents to teach their children as much as they can," says DrRajan Bhonsle, founder-director of Heart to Heart Counselling Centre. Someoverambitious specimens expect their two-year-olds to watch Animal Planet andidentify different species of bats, or to know that the bat is not a bird but amammal. "Although children have the capacity to grasp and memorise a largevariety of things, you can't expect a toddler to understand what a mammal is,"he exclaims. "At the end of it, TV alone can't be blamed. Blame the parents whodon't know how to use it, and how much of it to use." On guard, telly parents,you may just raise a batch of tellytubbies!
joeanna.rebello@timesgroup.com
