Television has revolutionised the way we live our lives, but do we need it? Is it a good thing that we have T.V. Or are we simply wasting our lives away with mindless rubbish? There are better things to do than watch T.V.
Academic achievement falling in children's work of children that watch ten or more hours of television per week, and studies prove that children that watch excessive television achieve lower on written expression, reading and mathematic achievement tests. The number of hours spent watching television has increased sharply and now the average American child spends more time watching television that they do at school. The average youth spends an average of nine hundred hours at school and fifteen hundred hours watching television in an average year. Children need to stop watching so much television and do something worthwhile that could help them in the long term, rather than wasting their time on television because the average child aged two to eleven watches almost twenty hours of television per week .
Obesity in children up. Since the introduction of television into children's lives they percentage of obese children aged six to eleven has also rapidly increased. In 1963 the percentage of seriously overweight children was 4.5% and by 1993 it had jumped to 9.5% to 14% of six to eleven year olds being obese. In 1985 there were twelve medical studies that had linked excessive television watching to obesity.
There is a good chance that there is a link between television violence and real life violence, 80% of Hollywood executives believe there is a strong link between violence on T.V. ad in real life. The number of violent acts that an average person by the time they are 18 of the television is 200,000 and the number of homicides seen on the television by the same age is 16,000. The number of news reports on homicide from 1990 - 1995 has increased by 336% and in 1997 there were 19,500 homicides in America.