One of the common messages in the Anak TV advocacy is delivered on television by Mikee Cojuangco Jaworski: “It is best that kids do not have TV sets in their bedrooms; that way, parents know what they are watching,”

Should we really remove TV sets from children’s bedrooms?

At a Lenten recollection organized by Anak TV and the Bible Quiz Foundation, we asked a handful of media personnel in attendance. They are primarily parents even if they are unabashedly passionate about pushing their shows’ ratings. A programmer from NBN said that even if the family had enough funds to install a TV set even in the bathroom, they chose to keep just one monitor in the living room and another in the master’s bedroom. She says she instructed the househelp to mind what the kids watch while the couple was away because the kids were talking showbiz all the time and were becoming mawkish with their gestures and behavior.

Another mother, this time from IBC, thinks that giving too much TV viewing leeway to children could lead to more harm than good. “TV-viewing can be addictive for kids and we noticed how so much of our kids’ lives was now revolving around TV shows! This is the reason we took out the TV set from their rooms.”

A British head teacher says pupils’ grades rose when computers and TV sets were removed from their rooms. The teacher complained to his pupils’ parents that the kids were arriving tired and irritable.

Chris Gravell, of UK’s Advisory Centre for Education, explained:

“The school that did this is a small, special school. The teacher apparently has a high level of trust with pupils and parents. When he takes equipment from a child’s bedroom, he is acting on the parents’ behalf. In those circumstances the initiative works. It is however difficult to see how it would work in large secondary schools or primary schools serving a wide area where children’s homes and circumstances aren’t often are the most vulnerable because they are mostly unable to filter reality from fantasy and up until they are in the tween ages, they look at anything on television as reality. They create a world view based on what they see on TV.

Worldwide, bedtime arrangements are among the few remaining areas where parents still call the shots. If children have TV sets, even PCs and game stations in their bedrooms, their use of these equipment should ideally be as a carrot to ensure that the kids toe the line at home and perform better in school.

Dang Koe, president of the Autism Society Philippines and a Monday columnist of this paper, uses chips as reward-and-punishment currency in her household. Good deeds by her boys are rewarded with chips which they can use to buy time to watch TV or play with the PC. That way, the kids become discerning and prudent with their choices of what to view since television is not readily available. When they misbehave, perform under par in school or become negligent, they are punished by coughing up some chips equivalent to the gravity of their misdemeanor.

Many agree, like Dang, that exposing kids to too much television can be bad for them. It is better that they develop language skills through real conversations with adults and other kids, not picked up from the artificially-concocted language of television. It is accepted that not even the most stimulating programs can ever compete with human interaction.