There has been a tremendous outcry over BabyFirstTV, a cable channel that launched in America last week and is expected to be in Britain by the end of the year. The station broadcasts programmes aimed at children aged six months to three years, round the clock.
It’s caused a terrible fuss, with academics claiming young children shouldn’t watch television at all and can learn nothing from it, and with family groups squeaking that the station will be used as a babysitter by bad parents.
I’m very bored with the guilt we are supposed to feel every time we park toddlers in front of the television. There isn’t actually anything wrong with using the television as a babysitter for short bursts of time here and there. We all do it, and we’re all made to feel bad about it. Why? I’d rather park my child in front of an educational, intelligently made programme specifically designed for two-year-olds than leave her to be looked after by a bored human babysitter who’ll sit there reading Heat and making phone calls to her boyfriend.
When my other children were younger and came home exhausted from nursery, children’s TV, or children’s videos, were the best possible way of getting them to calm down and relax before tea. When my middle child, then aged 2½, suddenly and inexplicably decided it was a really fantastic idea to get up at 3am, wide awake and ready for the day — this went on for six months — videotapes of children’s programmes saved my sanity. He would watch, enraptured, and I would catnap on the sofa next to him.
Throughout their childhoods, if I wanted half an hour to myself, to make a phone call or get on with some work, or have a cup of tea and read the paper, I’d stick a video on. I got peace, the boys got their beloved Thomas the Tank Engine.
I really fail to see what the problem is with this, or why I should feel ashamed about it. I know that some mothers pride themselves on their infinite capacity for martyrdom, and would have taken starting the day at 3am in their stride, with baking and a little light finger-painting before dawn, but I’m not one of them.
I also take serious issue with the idea that toddlers or infants learn nothing from television. A study by one Patricia Kuhl, of the University of Washington in Seattle, has found that children aged 10 months learn sound patterns easily by playing with adults but learn nothing at all by watching the same adults performing the same games and exercises on a television screen. And Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said last week that the best evidence suggested television for toddlers was a waste of time. “If an infant is watching TV for an hour a day, then fine,” she told The Times. “It is not going to do them any harm, though it will do no good either.”
This is complete and utter nonsense, in my experience, and I can’t understand how it has come to be taken as fact. Both my older children knew the alphabet from the tenderest age, thanks to listening to The Alphabet Song on the genius Sesame Street, and were also pretty good on colours, shapes and letter recognition. They read fluently by their fourth birthdays — and although obviously I read books to them, at length, I do think Sesame Street had more than a little to do with it.
But what has really changed my mind about very young children’s ability to learn from television is my experience with my daughter, who is two, who has DiGeorge syndrome, possible palate issues, and consequently severely delayed speech. We use a form of sign language called Makaton with her. Learning to sign is quite hard work, and when I was told I would have to, I got slightly panicky about having to go off on long courses and study vast manuals in bed and there simply not being enough hours in the day.
Don’t worry, said our lovely speech therapist at Great Ormond Street hospital. Watch Something Special on television with her, and you’ll both pick it up in no time. A year or so on, we’re signing away — and my daughter is streets ahead of me, because she has picked up so many signs from watching them on television, and picked them up much faster than her father or I. She sees them used repeatedly throughout one half-hour programme, and then she knows them. In what possible way does this constitute not learning from television? We are absolutely blessed in this country to have free access to CBeebies, the BBC’s dedicated channel for young children, which shows the aforementioned Something Special, a simply brilliant programme for children with special needs which is presented by the amazingly funny, kind, Makaton-friendly Justin Fletcher (who is the person I would most like to meet in the entire world).
For this programme alone, I would happily quadruple what I pay for our licence fee. But the channel’s entire output is fantastic: over the Easter holidays Graham Norton was doing a Jackanory-style slot, reading stories from a cosy armchair. There are repeats of Teletubbies and Balamory, The Fimbles, Something Special (be still, my heart), the hilarious Boogie Beebies, which teaches children simple dance routines, Boo!, Brum, Tikkabilla (also featuring Justin), Pingu — the list goes on.
I am not a blanket fan; I want to kill The Tweenies, who make me feel physically unwell (I catch myself swearing under my breath at the simpering giant puppets) but you can’t have everything. What we do have, though, is exemplary — the channel is the shining jewel in the BBC’s crown.
And yet we’re supposed to feel bad about letting our children watch it. Never mind that it exposes them to all sorts of things they don’t necessarily come across in everyday life — aeroplanes, dogs that do tricks, wild animals, the countryside, the inner city, music, dance, sign language, people from ethnic minorities, children in wheelchairs, to name the merest few.
For a certain kind of middle-class mother (of the martyrish persuasion described above), having the television on remains not only utterly reprehensible but a sign of lax, irresponsible parenting. I think the exact opposite is true.
- Britain’s youngest mother, due to give birth next month, got pregnant when she was 11. The girl, now 12 and from West Lothian, had unprotected sex with a 15-year-old boy during a night out in Edinburgh. She smokes 20 cigarettes a day. Her mother, who is 34, said: “I’m not ashamed of my daughter at all — in fact, I’m proud of her for keeping her baby.”
It’s nice to know the girl will enjoy the support of her family. But she rather proves the point I’ve been making: more supervised, educational television, fewer nights out on the razz. Nobody ever got pregnant watching CBBC.
india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt through having a child with special needs, it is not to judge other people in a similar boat
