A CranioSacral Approach - compiled by Michele Wolhuter RCST

If you are over the age of 30, then you are one of the last generations to experience your childhood without the influence of current media technology.  If you are American, then you need to be over the age of about 50.  Your childhood was very different from your own children’s, and new evidence is suggesting that your children’s cognitive abilities will not be as complete, or advanced as yours are, even though they have the potential to rise far above you in brain capability.  This is, in part, because of the influence and effect of media exposure on the developing brain of the child.

Television has been in existence for the past 80 years, although the broadcasting of entertainment shows didn’t begin until the 1940’s.  In 1950, 10% of American households owned a TV set.  By 1954 this percentage had increased to 50%.  Since 1970, more than 98% of American households own a TV and currently 66% of household own three or more TVs.

Television is on almost 7 hours per day in an average American home.  A study sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation and released in November 1999, revealed that most children between 2 and 18 years old are exposed to an average of 6 ½ hours of daily media exposure, of which television is the most dominant.  A child spends more time watching television than any other activity except sleeping, and by age 18 a child has spent more time in front of a TV than at school. 1

Today’s youth have access to more media with more channels or outlets within each medium, offering more content, more vividly than even the most ‘outlandish’ mid-century science fiction novels once predicted, and is creating a media environment in which youth use these media largely independent of adult supervision or comment.

Strangers in Our Homes – Some Points to Ponder

There are sixteen acts of violence per hour of children’s programming, only eight per hour on adults.  By the time our children become teenagers, they have seen an estimated 18,000 violent murders on television.  Life is shown to be expendable and cheap, yet we condemn them for acting violently. 2

An extensive, fifteen year longitudinal study in the United States, Canada and South Africa, showed long-term childhood exposure to TV as a causal factor behind approximately one half of the homicides, rapes and assaults committed in these countries. 3

Children have an instinctive desire to imitate observed behavior without reasoning whether it ought to be imitated or not.  They mimic anything, including destructive and anti-social behaviors.  Infants as young as 14 months of age demonstrably observe and incorporate behaviors seen on TV. 4  From TV, our children learn that life is violent, and people, including one’s self, are expendable.  Remember that your four year old can not yet properly differentiate between fact and fiction – what s/he views on television is real.

Cartoon violence is carefully and deliberately used to lure the child to watch, and to attract the largest possible audience for the purpose of selling products.  Violent cartoons have been found to be the easiest means of attracting the entire 2 to 11 year age group.  The most serious and devastating effect of this marketing scheme is desensitization and the development of thick-skinned, detached, cynical human beings. 5

After the introduction of television in South Africa in 1974, the murder rate among the white population increased by 56% over the next nine years. 6

More than 3 000 studies over the past 30 years offer evidence that violent programming has a measurable effect on young minds. 7

The Loss of Imagination

“Imagination is more important than knowledge,
for while knowledge points to all there is,
imagination points to all there will be”
- Einstein

All of the above quoted examples are to do with the content of the programmes our children are watching – far more damaging, and far more concerning, is the neurological and developmental damage that the ‘act’ of watching television causes. 

As Joseph Chilton Pearce in his book Evolutions End explains:  television floods the infant-child’s brain with images at the very time his or her brain is supposed to learn to make images from within.  On the other hand, when a child is read a story (especially one with not many pictures), s/he has to learn to form images (pictures) from within.  With each new story read or told to the child, the brain is challenged to enlarge the number of neural fields involved to form new images.  Television however, can be assimilated by a single set of neural fields – each time the television is put on, the same set of neural fields are activated.  We habituate to television within a few minutes of viewing, from the very first exposure on, since no creative response is needed or can be made.

This means, in effect, that all those thousands hours of television the average child sees may as well have been all one program.

Marie Winn in her book The Plug-In Drug explains that as a child reads s/he creates pictures in his mind and uses imagination and points of reference to put the story together.  “Television images do not go through a complex symbolic transformation.  The mind does not have to decode and manipulate during the television experience.  It may be that television-bred children’s reduced opportunities to indulge in this ‘inner picture-making’ accounts for the curious inability of so many children today to adjust to non-visual experiences”.  Watching television and playing video games does not develop a child’s skills in word recognition, decoding, vocabulary, spelling or high-level thinking.  Watching television is a passive exercise, leaving no opportunity for interaction, in fact, it has been characterized as multi-leveled sensory deprivation that may be stunting the growth of our children’s brains.

Failing to develop imagery means having no imagination.  This is far more tragic than not being able to daydream.   As Joseph Chilton Pearce sums up:  it means children who can’t “see” what the mathematical symbol or the semantic words mean; nor the chemical formulae; nor the concept of civilization as we know it.  They can sense only what is immediately bombarding their physical system and are restless and ill-at-ease without such bombardment.  Because these children are sensory deprived they initiate stimulus through constant movement or other such action.  These children become agitated when left to their own devices, unable to entertain themselves or play.  Bored children are a modern day phenomena.

One of the main problems with television is that children get used to not using their imaginative thinking at all, and they don’t exercise the part of the brain (the neocortex) that creates the pictures.

TV rots the senses in the head!
It kills the imagination dead!
It clogs and clutters up the mind!
It makes a child so dull and blind.
He can no longer understand a fantasy,
A fairyland!
His brain becomes as soft as cheese!
His powers of thinking rust and freeze!

-an excerpt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl, 1964

Television and The New Labels

My biggest concern, states Joseph Chilton Pearce, is to do with the way the television industry countered the hypnotic effect of watching television by introducing what are known as “startle effects” into children’s programming.  A startle effect is anything that triggers the brain into thinking that there might be an emergency out there and alerts it to pay special attention to the source of the disturbance.

Television accomplishes this with sudden and dramatic changes of intensity of light or sound and a rapid shifting of camera angles.  Eventually, however, the brain starts getting used to the situation, realizing that these are just false alarms, and it starts to tune out again.  As a result, every ten years or so the television industry has made the startles bigger and brighter, until finally what we have are periodic bursts of violent imagery in children’s cartoons and so on, to the point now where there are an average of sixteen bits of violence every half-hour.  Here the nature of the program content does matter.  While the higher brain, or neocortex, knows that the images on TV aren’t real, the lower, or “reptilian” brain does not.  This means that when a child views violence on television, the reptilian brain sends a series of alarm messages up to the emotional brain, which in turn immediately contacts the heart. The moment the heart receives any indication of negativity or danger, it drops out of its usual harmonic mode into an incoherent one, triggering the release of the single most potent hormone in the human body, known as cortisol.  Cortisol instantly wakes up the brain and causes it to produce trillions of neural links in order to ready the individual to face the emergency.

Then as soon as the heart gets the message that the coast is clear, another hormone is released to dissolve all of the new neural pathways that weren’t used to make a quick, adaptive reaction to the perceived threat.  The trouble with current-day children’s television programming is that there’s never any let down, and the brain of the average American child, who has watched 6 000 hours by the age of five, is suffering a great deal of confusion as a result.  The massive over-stimulus from TV is causing the brain to maladapt in ways previously thought impossible.  It is literally breaking down all levels of neural development. 

Dr Byron Reeves of Stanford University conducted studies of TV viewers’ electrical brain activity.  Their brains responded to the movements on the TV as if they were actually real, causing the nervous system to prepare for a physical response. 8   Our brains are very sensitive to quick movements, sudden noises, and colour changes that might signal danger, so we prepare for fight or flight to protect ourselves.  TV programmers know and use this to keep us watching, even when we may not want to.  You can confirm this for yourself by counting all the lighting changes that occur during a TV show and commercials.  Because there is a natural physical reaction to danger, and there is no outlet for the impulse when watching TV, the watcher may develop overactivity, frustration or irritability that can affect other areas of his life.

It is interesting to note that hyperactivity is exhibited in boys eight times more often than in girls.9  Boys are given very vivid models through male violence on TV.  They are given strong messages to be tough and ‘play it cool’ in the face of violence. With no acceptable way to release or express the stress they feel, adrenalin pumped into their muscles may lead to aggressive behaviour. They are constantly in a hyperactive state where excess energy causes them to constantly move or fidget.  We have to remember that when there is excess cortisol in the system, concentration and focus becomes impossible, because our bodies are geared up to run from the perceived danger.  At such times, learning is very difficult.  The next step is that the child is given a label – hyperactive, ADHD, ADD or Emotionally Handicapped. 10

It is also very interesting to note that ‘learning disorders’ such as ADD, ADHD, dyslexia etc. have only become as prevalent as they are today since the advent of television and other media exposure.  More and more evidence is surfacing that condemns it as one of the aspects that is negatively affecting our children’s development and ability to cope in the classroom.

Some examples of the neural damage in modern day children have been documented by The German Psychological Institute who conducted a twenty-year study of 4000 children per year on children who have watched the average 6000 hours of television by the age of six.  Researchers found that twenty years ago young people could distinguish between 360 different shadings of a single color category like red or blue.  Today it’s down to about 130.  That is over a 2/3 loss of their ability to detect shadings of color. This is strictly a neuro-cognitive breakdown.  The most serious change they uncovered was a breakdown of the brain’s ability to cross index its whole kinesthetic/sensory system.  That is, more and more children’s sensory systems are acting as isolated components in the brain and less and less as coordinated whole gestalts.

When they placed the young test subjects in a natural environment that had no high-density stimuli, such as come from television, they grew very anxiety-ridden, bored and tended toward violence.  The final disturbing finding of the German study is that there has been over the same twenty-year period, a 20% reduction in the children’s awareness of their natural environment.

The Loss of Play

As Joseph Chilton Pearce so beautifully puts it:  play develops intelligence, integrates the various parts of our brain, prepares us for higher education, creative thought and taking part in and up-holding a social structure; it also helps up prepare for becoming an effective parent when the time comes.  Play is the very force of society and civilization, and its breakdown will reflect in a breakdown of society. 11

Dr. Phyllis Weikart, associate professor in the Division of the Physical Education at the University of Michigan and author of Round the Circle:  Key Experiences in Movement, fears that lack of play and body movement is jeopardizing young children’s potential learning abilities.  She thinks adults are too busy trying to sit children down and force learning, rather than letting them play naturally to build the motor-control centers of their brains. 12  All this conversation is going on about cognitive development, but we’ve forgotten the child’s body, she says.  The amount of physical activity since the turn of the century has declined seventy-five per cent;  children are not playing, and through play a great deal of active learning takes place.  Children used to play in natural ways, with children of different ages, outside, basically unsupervised by adults.  Visual and auditory attention, body coordination – all were gained through that kind of play.

“The average child in the United States sees six thousand hours of television by their fifth year, at which point, in the midst of what should be the high point of their dreamlike world of play, we put them in school, prevent bodily movement (most purposive learning is sensory-motor at this age), and demand they handle highly abstract-symbolic systems (alphabets and numbers) for which most of them have no neural structures at all.  Driven by nature to follow their models, they try and can’t.  Their self-esteem collapses and failure and guilt give rise to anger.  Even after beginning school, they continue their time-percentage of television viewing unabated.  They spend more hours looking at television than attending school, and our national daily viewing time grows year by year”
-    -          Joseph Chilton Pearce.

The End of Reading and the Myth of Educational TV

“Educational television should be absolutely forbidden.  It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up and dance around with royal-blue chickens.”
- Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life, 1978

Our visual system, “the ability to search out, scan, focus, and identify whatever comes in the visual field” 13, is impaired by watching TV.  These visual skills are also the ones that need to be developed for effective reading.  Children watching TV do not dilate their pupils, show little to no movement of their eyes, and lack the normal saccadic movements of the eyes (a jumping from one point to the next) that is critical for reading.  The lack of eye movement when watching TV is a problem because reading requires the eyes to continually move from left to right across the page.  The weakening of the eye muscles from lack of use can’t help but negatively impact on the ability and effort required to read.  In addition, our ability to focus and pay attention relies on this visual system.  Pupil dilation, tracking and following are all part of the reticular activation system.  The RAS is the gateway to the right and left hemispheres of the brain.  It determines what we pay attention to and is related to the child’s ability to concentrate and focus.  The RAS is not operating well when a child watches television. A poorly integrated lower brain can’t properly access the higher brain.  Another concern with colour television sets is that the color from it is almost exclusively processed by the right hemisphere of the brain so that the left hemisphere functioning is diminished and the corpus callosum (the pathway of communication between the brain’s hemispheres) is poorly utilized (i.e., poorly myelinated). 14

Jane Healy, in the book, Endangered Minds, wrote an entire chapter entitled “Sesame Street and the Death of Reading”.  In addition to the concerns already mentioned about watching television, the majority of children’s programming seems to put the left hemisphere and parts of the right hemisphere into slow waves of inactivity (alpha waves).  Television anesthetizes our higher brain functions and disrupts the balance and interaction between the left and right hemispheres.

Reading a book, walking in nature, or having a conversation with another human being, where one takes the time to ponder and think, are far more educational than watching TV.  The television –  computer games and cell phones – are replacing these invaluable experiences of human conversations, storytelling, reading books, playing “pretend” (using internal images created by the child rather than the fixed external images copied from television), and exploring nature.  Viewing television represents an endless, purposeless, physically unfulfilling activity for a child.  Unlike eating until one is full or sleeping until one is no longer tired, watching television has no built-in endpoint.  It makes a child want more and more without ever being satisfied. 15 The cycle is never completed.

Maybe the most critical argument against watching television is that it affects the three characteristics that distinguish us as human beings.  In the first 3 years of life, a child learns to walk, to talk and to think.  Television keeps us sitting, leaves little room for meaningful conversations and seriously impairs our ability to think.

Some Suggestions to Aid Our Children’s Brain Development

• Keep the television turned off as much as possible.   It helps to store the TV away in a closed cabinet or closet.  Out of sight really helps the child keep the TV out of mind.  Remember that what we do serves as a role model for our children - we can’t really ask our children to stop watching TV if we keep doing it.  It is recommended that you avoid television and computers as much as possible for the first 12 years of your child’s life. When the television is on, then try to neutralize its damage. Select the programs carefully and watch TV with your child so you can talk about what you see.  Keep a light on when the TV is going since that will minimize the effects of the reduced field of vision and provide a different light source for the eyes.  Sit at least 4 feet away from the television and 18 inches from the computer screen.  Always go outside (to the park, woods, or beach) after viewing television. The same can be said for computers - everything hinges on age appropriateness.  We must encourage children to develop the ability to think first, and then give them the computer. After that the sky’s the limit.  But if you introduce the computer before the child’s thought processes are worked out, then you have disaster in the making.  This is because the first twelve years of life are spent putting into place the structures of knowledge that enable young people to grasp abstract, metaphoric, symbolic types of information

• Read a lot of books to your children (especially ones without lots of pictures) and tell your children stories.  Children love to hear stories about our lives when we were little or you can make them up.  Telling our children stories helps to stimulate their internal picture making capabilities.

• Encourage spontaneous imaginative play, either alone or with other children.  Allow children to create their own toys.  Steer clear of non-creative, fully constructed commercial toys.

• Nature! Nature! Nature! Nature is the greatest teacher of patience, delayed gratification, reverence, awe and observation.  The colors are spectacular and all the senses are stimulated.  Many children today think being out in nature is boring, because they are so used to the fast-paced, action-packed images from television.  We only truly learn when all our senses are involved, and when the information is presented to us in such a way that our higher brain can absorb it.

• Honor care of other people, pets and objects.

• Encourage lots of movement and interaction with other children to develop playground rules, sharing and the beginnings of altruistic behavior.

• Have children use their hands, feet and whole body performing purposeful activities.  All the outdoor activities of running, jumping, climbing and playing jump-rope help develop our children’s gross motor skills and myelinate pathways in the higher brain.  Performing household chores, cooking, baking bread, knitting, woodworking, string games, finger games, painting, drawing and coloring help develop fine motor skills and also myelinate pathways in the higher brain.

• Pay close attention to your senses and those of your child.  Our environment is often noisy and over-stimulating to the sense organs.  What a child sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches is extremely important to his or her development.  We need to surround our children with what is beautiful, what is good and what is true.  How a child experiences the world has a tremendous influence on how the child perceives the world as a teenager and adult.

(Some of the above suggestions come from Susan. R. Johnson’s article Strangers in Our Homes:  TV and our Children’s Mind’s as well as Carla Hannaford’s Book, Smart Moves, Why Learning is Not All in Your Head.)
Notes:

1   Johnson, Susan. R. Strangers in Our Homes:  TV and Our Children’s Minds in a paper presented to the Waldorf School of San Francisco 1999.

2  Pearce, Joseph Chilton.  Evolution’s End, Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence.  San Francisco:  Harper & Row, page 169 – 170

3  Centerwell, B.S. Exposure to Television as a Cause of Violence.  IN: G. Comstock (editor), Public Communication and Behavior. Orland, FL:  Academic Press, 1989. Vol. 2, pp 1-58

4  Meltzoff, A.N. Imitation of Televised Models by Infants.  IN: Child Development, 1988 (59), pp 1221-1229

5 Hannaford, Carla. Smart Moves, Why Learning is Not All in Your Head. Great Ocean Publishers, 1995, page 172.

6  Seven-year statistical analysis study by Dr. Brandon Centerwall at the University of Washington.

7  Christian Science Monitor, July 6,1993.

8  Healy, Jane M. Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think and What we Can Do About It.  1990 New York p. 200

9  Biederman, J., S. Faraone, K. Keenan, D. Knee & M. Twuang.  Family Genetic and Psychosocial Risk Factors in DSM-III Attention Deficit Disorder.  IN: Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 1990 (vol. 29).

10  Hannaford, Carla. Smart Moves, Why Learning is Not All in Your Head.  Great Ocean Publishers, 1995 p. 172

11  Pearce, Joseph Chilton.  Evolution’s End, Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence.  San Francisco:  Harper & Row

12 Weikart, P. Round the Circle:  Key Experiences in Movement. Ypsilanti, MI:  High Scope Press, 1986

13 Buzzell, Keith.  The Children of Cyclops:  The Influence of Television Viewing on the Developing Human Brain. 1998 California:  AWSNA

14  Johnson, Susan R. M.D., Strangers in Our Homes:  TV and our Children’s Minds in a paper presented to the Waldorf School of San Francisco 1999

15 Buzzell, Keith.  The Children of Cyclops:  The Influence of Television Viewing on the Developing Human Brain. 1998 California:  AWSNA