Battling Social Media

When I was in 8^th grade, the top sitcom on television was Night Court.  The show was hilarious, but morally bankrupt.  All the characters were promiscuous and unscrupulous.  In fact, one of the characters was once asked how many women he’d slept with, and he responded, “Do you know that sign at McDonald’s that says over one million served?  I’m competitive.”

So, it should be no surprise that my parents wouldn’t allow me to watch that show.  Night Court was completely inappropriate for children.  I would never let my children watch that garbage either.

However, I was the only child in my 8^th grade class that didn’t watch that show on Thursday night.  On Fridays, Night Court was the only thing discussed on the bus, on the playground, and at lunch.  By the time I came home from school I could recite every joke from the show.  I knew the entire storyline.  I absolutely hated going to school on Fridays, because everyone else watched Night Court and I didn’t.  I wanted to stay home.  Fridays were miserable.

I just finished reading a wonderful book by Wendy Mogel, Ph.D., called The Blessings of a Skinned Knee.  I enjoyed the book because I agreed with almost everything she said, except her views on television.

She argues that parents must let their children watch television, in order to “fit in” at school.  She argues, “…so much of grade school social currency is based on knowing what is going on in the media.”

While she states that allowing your children to watch everything is bad, she also argues that over-policing the children’s media is equally damaging.

Funny, since she spends considerable time talking about how bad television can be.  She writes,

“Children spend more hours watching television each day than they do talking to their parents.  Unfortunately, the youngsters in sitcoms talk back to adults, make nonstop wisecracks, and rarely converse with their parents in a civilized way.  Although many parents find it hard to believe, children who watch a lot of TV are often completely unaware of the sassy tone of voice or rude language they’re using.  They think it’s normal.”

Television is just another reason why life is easier when children are homeschooled.  Sure, you have to spend all day with your children, you can’t blame someone else when they aren’t learning, but most parents don’t realize this little fact – homeschoolers don’t watch television.  Of all my children’s homeschooled friends, I can’t name one family that lets their child watch anything more than an occasional nature show or The Magic School Bus.  Very few battles rage over social media when children are homeschooled.

My husband has noticed this too.  He says that the more time he spends around nine year old boys, the more he appreciates my sacrifice to homeschool.  He loves the boys in our local Catholic Cub Scout pack, but states that he can tell which kids are homeschooled and which kids attend school because the school children talk about television constantly.

Now that I am a parent and I can look back at my childhood, it gives me such pains when I think of my 8^th grade year.  I was so miserable not watching the popular television shows.  I was “different” – a fatal flaw in junior high.  However, as a parent, I would never let my kids watch Night Court either.  What is a parent to do?  Homeschooling isn’t an option for everyone, but this is just one way it has made my life so much easier.

By the way, I’ve never seen an episode of the Dukes of Hazard.  My parents wouldn’t allow me to watch that show, either.

Our choices shape our eternity

Our choices shape our eternity

In Muslim countries like Pakistan, many of the young men begin studying the Koran as soon as they can read. In fact, many of them learn to read using the Koran. They read and discuss the Koran every day, for hours each day, every day of the week until they know it by heart. Many of them can recite whole sections of the Koran without thinking. Little by little, like water dripping on a stone, it shapes their whole view of the world—what’s right and what’s wrong; what’s important and what’s not.

Here in America, we have a similar kind of training. It’s called television.  The typical American spends between three and seven hours a day watching TV and sees well over 2 million commercials in the course of a lifetime.

That’s a form of education. And most of what we see on TV teaches us that buying a lot of products makes us happy; that young is good and old is bad; that we should eat whatever we want but that we also need to be thin; that suffering doesn’t have any meaning; that relationships never last; that most families are dysfunctional; that authority is dangerous; and that religious people are hypocritical.

None of us lives forever. Or rather, all of us live forever, but only for a very short time in this world.  If we lose our money, we can often earn it back.  But if we misuse our time, we can never get it back.&nb sp; Where we put our time shows the world what we really value and believe. What we really believe shapes our choices.  And our choices shape our eternity.

Muslims didn’t develop their admirable piety in a vacuum.  They borrowed their reverence from Jews and early Christians, who had a profound love for the written Word of God in the Old and New Testaments.  The lesson for us today is simple.  American Catholics have the one true Word of God in the Bible.  If we took just one hour of the time we waste on television every day and used it to study and pray over the Gospels, we’d be fundamentally different people, and our country and our world would be transformed.

We were made for better things than silver and gold.  We’re more than what we own or think we want.  We’re children of God bought back from slavery by the blood of God’s son.  Somebody infinitely good, willingly died to make us free.  That’s how precious we are in the eyes of God.  God loves us infinitely.  That’s the source of our faith and hope.

God’s love is not something anyone can buy.  It’s a free gift.  But it comes with consequences.  If we really believe that God raised his son from the dead in order to raise us along with him, then we need to act like it.  We need to submit our time and our actions to what we claim to believe.  A meaningful life is a life conformed to imperishable things.  And a futile life is a life that puts its time in the wrong places—into things that perish; things that lead us away from conforming our lives to Jesus Christ.

Those are the two options.  We get to choose.

 

This article was originally published at: http://www.archden.org/index.cfm/ID/6404

 

Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M., Cap. is the archbishop of Denver. To read more writings and discourses by Archbishop Chaput, click here.

 

DVDs for young children poorly designed, study shows

Tue, Dec 8, 2009 (Reuters Health) — Thinking of buying your toddler an “educational” DVD for the holidays, or gifting one to a friend’s preschooler? If you’re buying them for educational value, you might want to reconsider.

A study published today shows that DVDs created specifically for very young children are so poorly designed that youngsters will probably derive very little benefit from watching them, the study team concludes.

Some of these infant and toddler DVDs “could potentially impede social and cognitive learning,” Dr. Sandra L. Calvert from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and colleagues warn in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

There has been an explosion of DVD products directed at children younger than age 3, despite little understanding of whether they fuel any kind of meaningful learning.

Recently, some children’s DVDs have come under criticism for language implying they were educational. After some of those criticisms, one producer, Baby Einstein — whose videos were among those reviewed by the research team — expanded a satisfaction-guarantee refund.

Calvert and colleagues analyzed 59 DVDs designed for children younger than 3 years. Thirty-one had a live format, 7 were animated and 21 had a mixed format. The packaging typically included educational claims and nearly three-quarters of the DVD titles implied that the product was educational, they note.

In analyzing the DVDs, Calvert’s team focused on the formal production features used to present the content. They gave most of the DVDs a failing grade.

“Most of the videos,” Calvert told Reuters Health, “were rapidly paced, filled with lots of changes in time and place that will be quite difficult for infants and toddlers to understand.”

The DVDs often moved along at a quicker pace than programs designed for older children in kindergarten and grade-school, she and colleagues found.

The investigators expected the DVDs to be packed with singing and rhyming, which boost preschoolers’ ability to comprehend and provides the opportunity for them to rehear and rehearse content, making it more memorable. However, they found that a third of the videos had no singing and more than half contained no rhyming.

Similarly, toddler-friendly camera zooms, which slowly move from a whole to a part and provide a focus for what a child should look at on the screen and assist in learning, were rare. Instead, camera cuts, which are difficult even for older children to understand, were common.

Narration and dialogue occurred only about a quarter of the time in the DVDs analyzed, and often it was an adult, not a child, doing the talking or narrating. Research has shown that preschoolers are more attentive to onscreen children than adults, Calvert and colleagues note.

They also found it “striking” that objects, instead of people, were often the focus of the DVDs. “Because infants learn the intended behaviors of a person trying unsuccessfully to put an object together on a video but not the same exact behavior of a machine, the use of object action in the infant and toddler sample could potentially impede social and cognitive learning,” they charge.

It’s estimated that half of American kids younger than age 1 watch television or DVDs, despite a recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics that children younger than 2 not have any “screen time.”

In a telephone interview with Reuters Health, Julie Clark, a mother and founder of Baby Einstein, said this study was “poorly designed.”

Despite the American Academy of Pediatrics stance against any screen time for toddlers, Clark said: “Babies and moms need some down time now and again. Personally, I don’t think there is harm in letting babies watch simple, age-appropriate programs once in a while.”

If parents decide to show videos to their very young child, Calvert advises that they look for educational content that has very few changes. “Key educational messages should be repeated, and the parent should watch with the child and interpret the content,” she said.

Nothing will ever replace the importance of a caring parent on children’s learning and development, be it through a real-life experience, an educational video, a book, or any other venue, she added.

“Put another way, videos, even if educational, are not an effective babysitter,” Calvert said.
– Megan Brooks

Catholic Vote has done it again!

Catholic Vote is such a great organization.  I loved their first video about Obama, which came out last fall (but most of the major media outlets refused to air it).  It was so positive and so beautifully done.

Now, they have a new video, all about health care reform.  It is called “Big Government Health Care PSA.”  It is hilarious.  Check it out at: 

http://www.catholicvoteaction.org/index.php

 

And, in case you missed the first video, here it is again:

Children’s TV time linked with behavioral problems

Fri, Apr 3, 2009 (HealthDay News) — Parking the kids in front of the TV might seem like an easy way to grab a couple of minutes to relax after work or make dinner, but too much TV time is definitely not a good thing.

 Researchers have found that, along with significantly increasing the risk of childhood obesity, the likelihood of behavioral problems also goes up when kids watch more than two hours a day of TV.

“Sustained TV watching has a negative effect on behavior and social skills,” said Carla Weidman, a psychologist in the child development unit at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

When children are watching TV, she explained, they’re not engaging in other important activities, such as imaginative play. They’re also not interacting with others to learn social skills and appropriate ways to resolve conflicts.”

“When TV is used as a babysitter or passive entertainment, that’s when it’s a problem,” said Dr. Christopher Lucas, director of the early childhood service at the New York University Child Study Center in New York City. “But, the reality is that parents can’t interact with their children all the time, and they have a need for a temporary babysitter.”

Some parents might take comfort in the idea that television offerings include educational programming.

“There’s a belief that if children are put in front of some educational medium, that it’s somehow a good thing,” Lucas said. “But, there’s evidence that the positive effect of educational programming in the absence of parental interaction is modest.”

The average child today spends 45 hours a week with some form of media, compared with just 30 hours in school, according to a report from Common Sense Media. Prepared by researchers from Yale, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and California Pacific Medical Center, the report compiled data from 173 studies on children and media and found that media exposure can contribute to childhood obesity, tobacco use, drug use, alcohol use, poor school achievement, sexual behavior and attention problems.

Problems from media exposure can start at a young age. Johns Hopkins researchers found that by the time a child is 5 1/2, those who’ve regularly watched more than two hours of TV daily are much more likely to exhibit behavior problems. In fact, aggressive behavior was more than doubled in youngsters who regularly watched more than two hours of television daily.

And, the Hopkins study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, found that 20 percent of kids from the 2,702 families studied watched more than two hours of TV a day. More than 40 percent of the youngsters had their own TVs in their bedrooms.

“I recommend removing the TV from the bedroom,” Weidman said. Along with creating sleep problems, she said, parents simply have no control over what children are watching in their bedrooms, and they’re not monitoring the programming.

“There are positives, such as educational TV, but you have to use it judiciously and monitor what the child is watching,” she said. “Remember, you are the parent, and you make the decisions. Don’t allow TV-watching decisions to be driven by the child.”

Lucas agreed. “Try to involve yourself in your kids’ media consumption,” he said. “You should be aware of what they’re watching, and don’t have the TV on during meals or in the bedrooms.” But, he said, “don’t beat yourself up too much if you plop your kids in front of a DVD sometimes.” It’s the constant, repeated exposure that seems to increase the risk of behavioral problems, he said.

And one more thing, Lucas suggested: Don’t use the TV as background noise. Even young children, who don’t understand the news, can pick up on the worry it might cause you, he said.

 – Serena Gordon

What a fabulous commerical!

Can you believe that the elites at NBC and CNN are afraid of this commercial?  They both refused to air it, although they have both aired other “advocacy” messages in the past. 

Media Bias against Sarah Palin

A Study in Character Assassination: How the TV Networks Have Portrayed  Sarah Palin as Dunce or Demon By Colleen Raezler and Brian Fitzpatrick, Culture and Media Institute Executive Summary Full Report| Pdf Version Apart from politicians embroiled in scandals, rarely have the public perceptions of a candidate soured so quickly.  According to Pew Research Center polls from September and October, the percentage of the public that sees Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin unfavorably shot up from 32 percent to 49 percent in just one month. Why have so many Americans turned against Palin, who made such a strong impression on the public when John McCain introduced her as his running mate at the Republican convention in September?  Most likely, it’s because the few good reports they’ve heard about the Alaska governor have been overwhelmed by a blizzard of bad reports. ABC, NBC and CBS news shows are covering Palin intensively, and they are running 18 negative stories for every positive one. Network coverage of Palin has moved beyond criticism to outright ridicule.  Strikingly, all three networks have repeatedly aired clips of Palin being parodied by a comedy show, NBC’s Saturday Night Live, leading to concerns that many Americans are confusing the real Palin with SNL’s figure of fun.  When have comic impressions of a political figure ever qualified as hard news? CMI reviewed network news coverage of Palin for the two weeks beginning September 29 and ending October 12, the period before and after the October 2 vice-presidential debate.  We found that ABC, NBC and CBS have been stridently critical of Palin.  Before the debate, the networks characterized her as a dunce whose shortcomings were dividing the GOP.  After Palin laid to rest concerns about her competence by performing well in the debate, the network narrative changed: Palin became a demon, victimizing Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama with unfair criticism   Major findings: Major network news shows ran 69 stories about Sarah Palin between September 29 and October 12.  37 stories were negative, just 2 were positive, and 30 were neutral.  Not a single evening news show ran a positive story about Palin. Overall, 21 network stories portrayed Palin as unintelligent and unqualified.  8 of these stories played a total of 11 clips of Saturday Night Live ridiculing Palin. 14 segments featured the most embarrassing clips from Palin’s interview with Katie Couric.  9 stories emphasized attacks on Palin by conservative columnists. 14 stories demonized Palin as little more than John McCain’s attack dog. ABC was hardest on Palin, with 9 negative stories (60%), 6 neutral (40%) and no positive stories.  NBC ran 15 negative stories (54%), 13 neutral (46%) and no positive stories. CBS ran 14 negative stories (54%), 10 neutral (38%) and 2 positive (8%). Conclusion Network coverage of Sarah Palin has been so distorted and out of balance that the public cannot trust what they’re hearing from ABC, NBC and CBS about the GOP vice-presidential nominee.  The networks have been so intent on assassinating Palin’s character that they have turned for added ammunition to sources they normally ignore – conservative columnists and comedians. Sarah Palin’s nomination changed the presidential race, creating a real threat to the media’s preferred candidate, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.  ABC, NBC and CBS have rallied to Obama’s defense by working hard to bring Palin down. Read the Full Text Here! To find out more information or to set up an interview, contact Colleen O’Boyle at 703-683-5004 ext. 122

Bella the Movie

I just saw the movie Bella last night.  It is such a wonderful movie, and I can’t recommend it highly enough! 

I’ve only seen three movies in the theatre in the past six years.  I am always so disappointed in the movies Hollywood produces.  Most movies are juvenile, unimaginative, negative, and downright offensive.  Bella isn’t any of these things.

Bella is a positive, feel-good, pro-life, pro-family movie.  The two main characters are Nina and Jose.  Nina is faced with an unplanned pregnancy, and Jose offers her support.  Jose is such a great character – he has depth and mystery about him, and it is clear that his motivation to help Nina stems from his faith. 

I thought the movie would be predictable and one-dimensional, but it wasn’t.  The movie frequently goes forwards and backwards in time, making it very interesting and entertaining.  It is a beautiful film! 

I also read somewhere that an additional motivation in making this film was to counter all the negative stereotypes of Mexicans in the movies these days.  This movie isn’t just a pro-life, pro-family, feel-good movie, but it is also a very positive portrayal hispanics as well.

I’ve gotten lots of emails lately (one forward was from the lead actor, Eduardo Verastegui, himself!) that the pro-choice industry wants to get Bella out of the theatres, and that the movie will be gone if it doesn’t do well at the box office.  Please tell all your Christian friends to see Bella this weekend!  You will enjoy it!

Even Tony Bennett loves Bella!  See the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdJ6OjAsEz0

Below is a link to the personal testimony of the lead actor:

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=LSu6XZ45Tw4