If children are spending 3 hours a day watching television, they must be doing it instead of what they would have been doing in those 3 hours if they didn’t have television, and we are interested in this question of substitution of activities. So we compared the children who did have television and were spending their 3 hours a day watching it with the children who didn’t yet have it to see just exactly what they might have been doing if they were not watching television.
We found some television time is a direct transfer from radio listening, movie going, comic book reading, and regular book reading. We found, however, that television watching is so much greater in time than the time that used to be spent on those other media that the child’s total exposure to mass media is just about doubled when the family gets television. That is, the television takes away a good deal of time from other mass media, but it also takes time from hobbies, from playing outdoors, from helping mother around the house, and all the other kinds of children’s activities that would go on. As I say, the total exposure to mass media is just about doubled with the advent of television in the home.
It is interesting, too, to note that TV children who watch television a great deal are the ones who read comic books a great deal. They are not the ones who read books. There is a negative relationship there, and the more a child watches television, the less he is likely to read books.
Some of the television time, incidentally, is taken from sleep time, as I have said, because the bedtimes are later.
All right; now what about the impact of having a television set upon family life?
You are all familiar with the statement that Henry Ford took the American family out of the home and scattered them and that television has brought them back together again. That is true, in a certain sense. We found in our study that the amount of time children spend actually in the physical presence of their parents and their other family members goes up when they get television because the family spends a good deal of time sitting together and watching television.
However, the amount of time a child spends with his family, not counting television time is very drastically reduced. It is about half as great, and what happens then is that the parents and children are sitting together watching something jointly, but they are not talking together nor playing together nor working together. They are only doing that half as much time as they used to before they got television.