Toys and Television
August 15, 2015
ALAN writes:
Toys representing monstrous and ugly creatures “should be banished from every toy box and tossed into incinerators,” you wrote in “The Occult in Children’s Toys.” Am I alone among your readers in suggesting that the same advice may apply to television?
“It would be better to play with sticks and mud” than with such toys, you wrote.
Precisely correct. Children must be made stupid; they are not born that way. And contrary to what many parents believe, “child’s play” is not frivolous. It is serious business to children, and properly so. They will make toys of what nature provides for them—sticks, mud, trees, hills, sand, flowers, snow, animals—and of common things in daily life—boxes, paper, crayons, rags.
Thirty years ago, Erma Bombeck wrote:
“I’m lucky enough to remember what childhood looked like. ….For entertainment, childhood could not be matched. It drew from the world of imagination and make-believe with blankets for clouds and little friends that weren’t there…..” [ Erma Bombeck, “Lost Heritage of Childhood”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 21, 1984 ]
There is much wisdom there for parents who can see it. And there is more here in the following words from Mrs. Sarah Cannon:
“Possibly one of the most tragic things about the modernization of our society is that children are no longer motivated to develop a strong imagination. They don’t know how to entertain themselves. Continual, exciting entertainment in living color is just a TV dial away. I don’t mean to keep putting down television. It’s the greatest thing that ever happened for performers. You can reach a larger audience in one night on TV than you would in a lifetime on the stage, and for a show-off like me, nothing is more appealing than that. But we do pay a price for this incredible invention, and the stifled imaginations of our young is undoubtedly one of the highest…..”
Sarah Cannon was born in 1912 and grew up in rural Tennessee, where she and her sisters and playmates had a very happy childhood—without television. She attended college and worked for a while as a teacher. But then she created a character through which she became known and loved by millions of Americans, especially those in the world of country music entertainment. Her professional name was “Minnie Pearl.”
It is one of the appalling ironies of modern life that many parents, with all good intentions, effectively neutralize their children’s imagination when they expose them to video screens from infancy onward.
Many years ago, when parents read aloud to their children in the evenings, they did not kill childhood imagination. They enhanced it. Books of classic stories for children did not kill childhood imagination. They enhanced it. Stories on radio in the 1930s-‘40s did not kill childhood imagination. They enhanced it. But television is radically different from those things. I have long thought that television is perhaps the greatest imagination-killing device ever invented.
Imagination is the seat of creativity and the basis for conceptual thought. Words, when spoken or written, require the use of imagination. But pictures on video screens appeal only to the eye, which is not the imagination, and often preclude any use of imagination.
Would Mark Twain have written anything worth reading if he had spent his boyhood gaping at a television screen? Would Margaret Mitchell have written “Gone with the Wind” if she had spent her childhood gaping at a television screen? Would Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein have written the score and book for “Show Boat” if they had spent their childhood staring at a television screen?
It is pathetic that so many parents today welcome video screens into their children’s lives in the belief (1) that more information and entertainment for children is better than less, and (2) that whatever is new and current is better than what is old.
Back to Sarah Cannon:
“When I look back on my idyllic childhood it saddens me to realize those days are gone forever—not just for me, but for most children growing up now. Television, with all its benefits and potential for education, has stripped us of our innocence, even in rural areas, and children know more now about the seamy side of life than I did when I went away to college…..
“I grew up totally innocent of evil or wickedness of any kind. I think one of the reasons Minnie Pearl has found so many fans is because she retained some of this guileless, childlike innocence that characterized my formative years. No one locked their doors or feared their neighbors in Centerville [ Tennessee, where she grew up ]. The whole town was my playground. I ran and romped everywhere, investigating anything, visited anyone I chose to visit, and had a wonderful time doing it…..” [Minnie Pearl: An Autobiography, p. 21]
In contrast to that kind of childhood—in which adults left children alone for substantial amounts of time to improvise their own play and to let their imagination inspire and guide them—what do we see today? Youth worship, mass-marketed entertainment, and more toys, games and gadgets than any generation of children in history ever dreamed of. But that is not the worst of it. The worst is that American parents today are suckers for all those things.
As to the claim that children “know more now than I did…..” That is true only in the most superficial sense: What children today think they know and what many of today’s parents think their children know are things that they do not comprehend and cannot comprehend until they have lived many years. Such “knowledge” is all surface and no substance. It is a kind of pretend “knowledge”. That is why so many people today applaud themselves for it: Because they are pretend grown-ups and pretend parents in a land that is oversaturated with pretentiousness and fakery of every kind.
The next time you visit any public or semi-public place and see people gaping at their trendy little screens wherever they stand, sit, walk, dine, ride, or congregate, keep in mind that they are the grandchildren of the first generations in American history who grew up gaping at television screens.
