Ideas@TheCentre
More ABC for kids?
Last year, I attended the Australia 2020 Summit. A lot of ideas were discussed over that cool April weekend in Canberra. Some of them were good and many of them were completely barmy. The report that was released soon after the summit contained some never-before-seen barmy ideas as a bonus.
Last week, the government released a response to the 2020 Summit ideas. From the more than nine hundred ideas, nine have been anointed and will be adopted as government initiatives. Predictably, they include some of the barmiest ideas.
The prime example is the decision to create a new taxpayer-funded digital ABC TV channel dedicated to children’s programming. My question is this: How much more TV can children watch?
ABC1 runs children’s programmes from 6am to 11am and then from 3pm to 6pm on weekdays. To prevent the TV from being turned off in the meantime, ABC2 runs children’s programmes from 9am to 4.30pm. That’s more than 12 consecutive hours of children’s programming every weekday. According to the press release, the new ABC TV channel would run 15 hours of children’s programmes in addition to the existing channels. If so, there will be several hours of each day where you would need to watch three TVs simultaneously just to see all the ABC’s children’s programmes, let alone what’s on the other three networks.
The children of Australia do not need to watch more TV! Child development experts advise that children watch no more than 2 hours of TV a day, and less for very young children. This is an unrealistic target for even the best of parents because the temptation of TV is so great, and let’s be honest, most of us enjoy it. But that does not mean parents don’t try to limit TV time. A lot of parents choose not to have pay TV for the very reason that they don’t want 24-hour children’s TV available.
And the issue is not about the influence of advertising or the ‘quality’ of the show. There are a lot of great shows. The problem with children watching too much TV is not because it is inherently bad for them but because it is a time-eater. Time spent in front of the TV is time that could be spent doing something else, particularly physical activity. Ramping up the ‘educational’ content and removing product endorsements will not change this indelible fact.
Of course, nobody has to watch the new children’s ABC channel, and we can always use the off button. But unlike pay TV, we’ll get billed for it anyway.
Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies
