How have DVDs distracted & detoured children from the pleasure of reading?

There is an auto commercial on TV that should raise the eyebrows of everyone who is concerned about traditional literacy (versus multimedia and multi-platform literacy). In the commercial, a woman is at an auto plant talking to designers or whomever about the features that she needs when she’s toting her children. The designers leap at the opportunity to boast about the individual DVD screens on the SUV.

It’s a cute commercial until you start to ask yourself why the heck that’s a selling point. How many children and young people are trained to count on reading during family car trips, instead of watching a DVD or playing with electronics? I am simply an uncle and fine with staying that way. But parents used to want their children to read, read well and pursue more and more difficult books. How many parents still do something about that? How many advocate it?

Stories and studies abound about how many fewer young people are reading; you know – books and stuff! One book that mentions this is “Boys and literacy: Rhetoric and Reality.”
www4.gu.edu.au:8080/adt-root/uploads/approved/adt-QGU20040623.140850/public/02Main.pdf

This addresses traditional literacy in both boys and girls. It establishes that the mother figure is vital to training and setting the standard for children to develop a taste for the pleasure of reading.

One must wonder what our intense emphasis on web-bound lifestyles - those that are based around technology - has wrought. It’s common for parents to shove their children in front of a video screen to keep them quiet and occupied; it happened to me (I’m still digging out and deprogramming myself from that.) It used to be called – and needs to be – the boob tube.

Many questions about lifestyle choices and parenting priorities lay open, right beside the baby monitor; perhaps the reader will see them there. Perhaps the parental figures will turn away from the video screen and ask themselves those decisive questions.