Kids losing the value of stories thanks to reality show hype

I READ something in the papers recently that confirmed a trend I’ve noticed in my own home – fewer young people are watching TV or movies these days.

If this was because they had taken to their beds and treehouses armed with books, or were whittling away daylight hours playing basketball and doing Pilates, I’d be glad. But no such luck; what they’re doing, instead, is dipping into the colourful candy store of internet viewing – with mixed results.

I like the fact that my pre-teen has a vast and mixed bag of entertainment options, with many educational offerings such as “how-to-make” blogs and YouTube videos on super-maths, rescuing her from being switched off by me, the literary police and intellectual idealist.

It’s when I catch her watching puerile, homemade “comedy”, or “oh my gaaaahd, you gotta try this hair colour to-day-ay” fare that I miss the days when TV for kids only started at 4pm, was heavily censored by the government (bland and boring, but safe) and ended at 6pm. There was nothing else to be done about it – we played cops and robbers (or even Star Wars, in later years) until TV time, and then went back outside at 6pm to play it again.

Movies were a treat. You had to wait about a hundred years for a Hollywood blockbuster to come out on video (remember those?) and then would likely wait another few weeks to hire it out, as the single copy was always booked well in advance by every other 10-year-old on the block and beyond.

But the difference then was two-fold: we all pretty much watched the same thing so we had a common understanding of what entertainment was; we spent much more time exercising our physical muscles than we did our lazy ‘’screen brain’’ ones and we didn’t take R10 for granted, as that covered a movie night, plus chips and a coke.

My pre-teen and her friends don’t even grasp the ‘‘movie night’’ concept anymore. Now, when I hand over the lounge to them, they watch YouTube – surfing from one amateur screen queen or king to the next, learning next-to-nothing about a storyline, with its beginning, middle, end and denouement.

What troubles me about this is not the fact that they’ve given up worshipping false idols in the form of movie starlets, but rather that they’re not focused on learning about a complete life in the form of someone’s story. Everything is ‘‘reality show’’ hype, without any genre – it’s all loud, it’s all comedy, it’s all American. There are no characters, even though the volume and volleyball script would have you believe that someone’s being tortured, or tickled, or worse.

I don’t want to be the boring adult or parent, but there’s something to be said for ploughing through a long, boring book, or even a movie, just because you appreciate its existence.

Nowadays, it’s too easy to click, browse, open a new tab and shut down whatever doesn’t grab your attention.

What I need my kids – and anyone under 18, really – to know, is that true art, like broccoli, may take a while to grow on you.

We often need to keep going back to something, or to keep at something before we understand why it’s called art, and why it’s infinitely meaningful.