Getting Unplugged

By Richard Stengel

How to beat TV addiction in four not-so-easy lessons

The television, its electrical cord trailing in the dirt like a useless tail, its great eye blank in the midday sun, was sitting in the center of the playground. In a semicircle around it stood a dozen four-year-olds, their eyes glazed, staring intently at the dark screen. Three adults emerged from the adjacent schoolhouse and lifted the set into the back of a station wagon. As the car pulled away, several of the children rushed to the wire fence, pushed their outstretched hands through the loops, and cried plaintively: "Goodbye, Mr. TV. Goodbye, Mr. TV."

This incident, says Professor Seymour Feshbach, chairman of the psychology department at U.C.L.A., occurred at a Los Angeles nursery school. Margaret Mead might have described the scene as a tribal rite of the global village; Marshall McLuhan might cite it as proof that the medium is indeed the message. But to Professor Feshbach as well as to Joan Anderson Wilkins, a researcher on family issues, it was not a symbol but an illustration of something more portentous: television addiction. Those nursery-school students are video junkies.

In her new book, Breaking the TV Habit (Scribners; $9.95), Wilkins describes the telltale signs and dangers of television addiction and offers a straightforward four-week program to break the habit without severe withdrawal symptoms. Addiction may be a metaphor, but the reality, according to Wilkins, is that among American children, television ranks second only to sleeping as a consumer of hours. The average American, both child and adult, watches more than six hours of television daily. By the age of 14, a devoted viewer will have witnessed 11,000 TV murders, claims Wilkins, and will digest 350,000 commercials before graduating from high school. A recent study at Michigan State University discovered that when four-and five-year-olds are offered a hypothetical choice between giving up television or their father, one-third will decide not to make room for Daddy.

What effect does habitual viewing have on children? Wilkins cites major studies that have reported a relationship between increased watching and decreased learning, between violence on television and aggressive behavior. Wilkins approvingly quotes Cornell Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, who once said: "The danger of TV lies not so much in the behavior it produces as in the behavior it prevents." Some examples: communication between parent and child, the capacity to entertain oneself, the ability to express ideas logically and feelings sensitively. Television, suggests Wilkins, does not sever children from reality, it becomes their reality, more vivid than the outside world to which it supposedly refers.

What are the signs of addiction? According to Wilkins, there are some key clues. Do the children come straight home from school and turn on the TV? Do they watch more than ten hours a week? Is their concentration span divided into seven-minute segments, the usual time between commercials? Do they require instant gratification? Do they feel a closer kinship to Oscar the Grouch than to their own cantankerous Uncle Oscar? Are they video zombies, listless and lethargic while viewing, revved up like the roadsters on The Dukes of Hazzard when they are not? As for parents, many of the same symptoms apply. Adults, however, are far more apt than children to deceive themselves about their own TV compulsion. Like alcoholics, says Wilkins, adults hooked on TV tend to underestimate their dependency. Wilkins' method of kicking the habit is like the old-fashioned way of losing weight: eating less. The first step, as with overcoming any addiction, is mustering the will to do so. During the first week of her four-week program, she advises keeping a detailed daily schedule of all viewing. Says she: "Everyone is astonished by the total number of hours." The second week: Decide precisely which programs to watch and why you plan to watch them. Be critical, she says, and rate the programs afterward. Week 3: Cut back. Keep only one set active (most middle-class homes, she avers, contain at least three sets). Select one hour of viewing a night, watch as a family, and collectively evaluate the shows. Week 4: Turn it off.

Earlier this year, Wilkins conducted a week-long cold-turkey cure with elementary-school pupils in Ridgewood, NJ. Her accounts of the week of abstinence often sound like the minimelodramas at a fat farm. Some families balked; some began and gave up; several starving mothers furtively watched General Hospital; one frustrated father resorted to taping Rangers' hockey games. In general, parents seemed to suffer the pangs of withdrawal more acutely than their children.

At times, Wilkins sounds like a Pollyannaish sitcom mom, regaling readers with the pleasures of life without TV. It might just be that many TV-liberated adults would fail to make profitable use of their new free hours and indeed find life unendurably dull without their daily electronic fix. Released from the video cocoon, children will not necessarily emerge as articulate and considerate, scoring perfect 800s on their SATs. In fact, television in small doses may enhance learning and understanding. A study conducted by the California state department of education revealed that although students who watched The Dukes of Hazzard scored less well than those who did not, students who watched M-A -S -H per formed better than those who did not.

Although Breaking the TV Habit explores no new ground in its indictment of TV, it does provide a fresh, perhaps even workable scheme for curing TV addiction. Wilkins presents a distressing vision of Television Land as an endless series of television sets, holding an infinite series of smaller sets, endlessly mirroring them selves. It was TV Critic Michael Arlen who said that television connects viewers to nothing except the assumption of being connected to something. Wilkins' advice:

To reconnect yourself to the world, disconnect the set.

-- By Richard Stengel.

Reported by Russell Leavitt/Los Angeles

With reporting by Russell Leavitt/Los Angeles

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