Essays

The Opportunity Costs of Watching Television

Nowadays, television watching appears to be practically indispensable for children to spend their leisure time in an entertaining way. Children can easily become addicted to television because it is not only enjoyable, but it also doesn’t require much energy. Data indicates that “seventy percent [of] teenagers admit to watching too much television,” and “ten percent [claim] that they are addicted, couch potatoes with roots.” (1) Although the attractiveness of television watching is quite obvious, children rarely notice the invisible opportunity costs of it. It is like a lollipop, which looks good and tastes sweet but costs some money that could have been spent more usefully. Likewise, there are several opportunity costs to children’s television watching because it is possible for children to spend their limited time in a more effective way.

One of the opportunity costs of children’s television watching is the time it takes away from reading. Kate Moody writes in her book, Growing Up On Television, “Each year children read less and less and watch television more and more. TV time usurps . . . reading time that could promote language development.” (2) For example, reading could help children expand their vocabularies and learn techniques to compose sophisticated sentences. Children could learn new technical terms from reading articles and essays. They could get to know diverse writing styles by reading books. Furthermore, reading could enrich children’s imagination. Instead of just seeing images or listening to sounds coming from the television, children could imagine scenes and features of their own by reading descriptive sentences.

In addition to reading, another opportunity cost of television watching is the time that could have been spent on exercising. According to the Media Directors web site, “Television acts much the way a tranquilizer does. It is very unlike sports and hobbies, where people generally walk away feeling refreshed.” (1) Watching television would not give children the refreshed feeling or help them develop their physical strength the way exercising does. Although watching sports on television can be quite enjoyable for children, it is not the same as improving their own physical skills by participating in sports themselves.

Besides reading and exercising, socializing is another significant cost of television watching. For example, having conversations with other people could strengthen children’s abilities to communicate. Children can express their own thoughts and feelings to others. They can receive reactions from others and make their own reactions to others in a two-way communication. Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim suggests that “children who have been taught, or conditioned, to listen passively to the warm verbal communications coming from the TV screen… are often unable to respond to real persons because they arouse so much less feeling than the skilled actor.” (3) Just as sports, dramas and movies on television are also very exciting for children to see, but they are entirely different from what children feel when they actually experience such events and human relationships themselves.

In short, when children watch television, there are opportunity costs that they will be missing out on such as reading, exercising, and socializing. It is up to the children whether they value television watching enough to bear the high opportunity costs it involves. However, it is preferable for children to choose reading, exercising, and socializing over television watching because these are all creative activities that could bring out the unique characteristic of children with some effort whereas television watching is a rather easy, passive way of spending time.

Reference

1. Media Directors Inc. Created in April 2002. “Television and Addiction.”

2. Written by Ron Kaufman. “How Television Images Affect Children.”

3. SimpleToRemember.com Written by Lawrence Keleman. “Social Interaction.”

(All information retrieved on November 3, 2003.)