Al Mohler’s commentary today (Dr. Mohler is the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is titled “The Tempter in the Child’s Bedroom—Television.” Now I realize that this is not going to make friends among some of you but I must admit astonishment and perplexity as to why any parent would do this. But I know some of you do so I post this hoping maybe some of you would follow the advice of the famous TV psychiatrist, Bob Newhart and “STOP IT!”
A summary of his report is this:
The New York Times published this past week a report claiming that the mere presence of a television set in a child’s bedroom is a direct threat to the child’s health. Documented is, “Children with bedroom TVs score lower on school tests and are more likely to have sleep problems. Having a television in the bedroom is strongly associated with being overweight and a higher risk for smoking.”
The staggering number to me is that according to one study, 70% of third-graders had a television set in the room. SAY WHAT? These are 8 year old kids!
The reporter for the Times concludes, “So while many parents try to limit how much television and what type of shows their children watch, that may be less than half the battle. Where a child watches is important too.”
Cornelius Plantinga, President of Calvin Theological Seminary has said, “But there is also real evil in it, and the trouble is that a lot of the evil is aimed at young people and children. The trouble is that when you're ten you can't always tell the difference between what's good and what's evil--and especially not if evil is made to look very, very attractive.
Do you know that even conservative Christian parents buy TV sets for the bedrooms of their ten-year-olds and then let them watch pretty much whatever they want? They buy a TV set for their fifth grader, hook it up to the cable system, hand their child a remote, and let their child close the door.
And now, day by day, night by night, their child's soul is in the hands of the Philistines… Every sick joke about God; every celebration of lust or revenge; every cynical assumption about the motives of good people--all this pours into the soul of a ten-year-old just as if her parents had hooked her up to an IV serviced by a profiteer.”
Now I know that Dr. Mohler is not suggesting that television is the direct cause of bad grades, sleep problems, and being overweight but there is a causative factor that it is associated with behaviors that do lead to this. The tempter is in the bedroom of children who have television located there.
To read the entire article, go to http://www.albertmohler.com/blog.php
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