TV is Satan’s lubricant! (Parental or remote control…?)
Throughout the ages the old have always complained about the young. These modern days of ours are no exception to this rule.
We do have a few more sticks and stones to throw at our unruly brood though. That’s the wonderful thing about modern technology: you can blame all sorts of things on it:
Young children who watch more than two hours of television a day show clear signs of bad behaviour, lower social skills and disrupted sleep patterns, a study has found, writes Steven Swinford.
The researchers who carried out the study said the evidence against sustained television viewing was now so strong that parents should ration viewing for younger children. They also warned that having televisions in bedrooms posed particular risks.
The study adds to a growing body of research that suggests television can damage children’s health and development. Prolonged viewing has previously been linked to obesity, attention deficit disorders and linguistic problems.
Now, I’m no expert – and life’s definitely too short to spend on doing all kinds of nonsensical research, which may or may not prove that TV turns children into stuttering & psychotic little lard dwarves who have trouble remembering why they have just set the cat or the milkman on fire.
Still, role models, anyone? You know: parents and other grown-ups leading by example?
Like this fine (if not quite upstanding) citizen:
Wheelchair-bound Ian MacKenzie, 47, has been slapped with an ASBO after a string of misdemanours which wound up locals and shopkeepers in Preston, Lancashire.
He also bombarded emergency crews with 999 calls in which he told telephone workers how dolphins mated.
Police collected a dossier of his bizarre nuisance behaviour in the Sharoe Green area and presented it to city magistrates. It included:
* hurling himself out of his wheelchair into main roads and supermarket car parks
* throwing his colostomy bag on the floor in front of shops and threatening to squirt passers-by with the contents
* relieving himself on the pavement in front of local businesses
MacKenzie, of Ashness Close, Fulwood, was facing up to five years jail, but Preston magistrates issued him with an ASBO ordering him to behave himself. The order which bans him from his regular haunts will run until October 2009.
Of course, most of the actual parenting has always been done by women. Which, on the whole, is a good thing, since a lot of men do seem to have trouble picking their nose and shouting abuse at the referee at the same time. In grown males we don’t usually call this kind of thing a Gross Attention Deficit Disorder – but only because it is such a damn mouthful. So, most of the time it gets abbreviated (mostly by women) to a tired ‘Ye Gadd!’
So, when your average male would rather hurl himself out of wheelchairs than set a good example to the young, it is a comfort to know that women are made of more dependable stuff. They can be trusted to show their children what grown-up behaviour is all about.
Right?
Ah well, dream on…:
Rescue crews freed a woman trapped under a sport utility vehicle in Brookline late on Monday morning.
Police said the woman, whose name has not been released, feared her husband was cheating on her. They said she went to spy on him by crawling under an SUV outside her husband’s alleged girlfriend’s house in the 1300 block of Oakridge Street.
She apparently fell asleep under the vehicle and became trapped after someone let the air out of the tyres.
Still, where parents fail, we always have the professionals, who can repair a lot of the damage that is done in the home environment. Yes, our dedicated teachers can always be depended on to come to civilisation’s and our children’s rescue.
Sort of…:
St. Louis - A middle school teacher was arrested after police said he showed up at school drunk, asked one of his students to fetch cognac, then fondled a student and made a sexual remark to another.
The teacher, Sterling Johnson, was charged with misdemeanor assault and a misdemeanor count of disturbing the peace. The school system will seek to have him fired, said Creg Williams, superintendent of public schools in St. Louis.
So, yes, by all means, let’s blame our TV sets for everything.
Hell, it makes as much sense as most of the other things we claim to believe in, hold as true and (hardly ever care to) vote for.
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