'Greening' our children: screens and ads don’t help

A couple of years ago, the Australian Council on Children and the Media ran a campaign with parents of children under the age of seven called Keep your children out of the firing line. It aimed to encourage the minimisation of children’s exposure to commercial TV with its 15 minutes of ads each hour, and if screen time was warranted, to view the ABC or use DVDs instead.

The context of that campaign was to seek to reduce the impact of food ads on children’s consumption of junk foods. Such a program could also work to reduce children’s “needs” for all sorts of consumer goods. And if combined with encouraging the recognition that children’s development would be enhanced by increased connection with their natural environment, could achieve greater benefits.

The US group Alliance for Childhood, in their 2004 paper Tech tonic: towards a new literacy of technology, recommend that:

… we need to colour childhood green to refocus education on children’s relationships with the rest of the living world.

The Alliance argues compellingly that:

Children’s lives are increasingly filled with screen time rather than real time with nature, caring adults, the arts, and hands on work and play. Yet only real relationships, not virtual ones, will inspire and protect them to protect the earth, and all that lives in it. (Alliance for Childhood, p1 Overview)

Would this not be an initiative worthy of government investment and wide community support?