Troubled Teens Resources

Have you ever wondered who you would be if you had never watched TV? If for your entire life you had developed opinions based on your own critical thinking as opposed to what some over paid pundit instructed you to think?

What if for every sit-com episode you’ve watched, you had read a book instead? Or gone biking. Or learned to dance. Why, I bet you’d be one knowledgeable, fit, entertaining person.

Now who would your teenager be if he had not absorbed the images, attitudes, violence and sensationalism he’s absorbed all of these years from the media. What ideas would he have imagined, what stories would he have written if for all these many years the media hadn’t supplied every idea and story, every song in his memory?

Wouldn’t we all, perhaps, be different people if we actually invested in who we are, if we explored our own lives instead of the lives of strangers in the latest reality show ? If we manufactured our own passions, dramas and hilarity.

According to a study out of England, published by the reputable Biologist magazine, media obsession is far more toxic than was ever suspected.

“Among the most disturbing findings are the links he claims to have found between long hours of television viewing and cancer, autism and Alzheimer’s.
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The stage for the harm Dr Sigman believes television is doing is being set, he claims, by the vast amounts of it we watch - by the age of six, a child will already have spent one year in front of the television. When time in front of a computer is added, the psychologist claims watching a screen of some kind is the dominant activity for older children - those aged 11 to 15 now spend 55 per cent of their waking lives, or seven and a half hours a day, watching television and computers. According to today’s report, that represents a 40 per cent rise in a decade.

Dr Sigman claims the battery of ill effects takes its toll on both body and mind. He claims the effect on the brain is not stimulating, but almost narcotic, numbing the areas of the brain stimulated by, for example, reading.

The influence of modern editing techniques - for example the rapid “jump cuts” - also plays its part. Attention spans fracture while at the same time, according to Dr Sigman, the brain is programmed to reward itself with the neurotransmitter dopamine for being able to cope with an onslaught of novelty on screen.”

It sounds perhaps odd to suggest, but an experimental intervention of sorts would be an interesting exercise for a parent to stage. An at-risk teen is not likely to profit much -physically or emotionally- by spending half of their waking lives abdicating control of their thinking and senses to an artificial medium.

A troubled teen does not reach a crisis stage in one fell swoop. They approach the danger zones of drug abuse or destructive behavior by increments. Excessive ingestion of media is yet another contributing factor in an at-risk teens decline. You could even coin a phrase; “media abuse.” No, not as dangerous as drugs or alcohol, but yet one more experience that fails to add value to our teenager’s lives.

So why not some type of intervention to test the results? A week off the tube. Better yet a month. I am betting the results of such an experiment would be surprising and beneficial to the entire family. It might make all the difference in the world.