Guest Author - Terrie Lynn Bittner

When I was a child, we watched the television program Brady Bunch as a family. I’m sure my parents were bored by the problems the Brady children faced, but they were natural teachers, and they saw the program as a teaching opportunity. During each commercial, they turned down the sound and we discussed the moral issues presented in each program, evaluating the choices characters made and offering our own solutions. If they were raising us today, we would have been required to watch only the video of the program, so the discussions weren’t limited to commercial breaks. Although they weren’t LDS and we didn’t attend any church, they wanted us to grow up with values, so they took every opportunity to help us achieve them. Most people called television junk, and they watched little of it themselves, but when they did watch, it was always with us. They saw it as one more tool they could use to help us learn to be the adults they hoped we’d become.

The television news was a nightly family event in our home. We watched together, and talked during commercials or dull stories. Together we evaluated issues surrounding the Viet Nam war, and they gave us the background the news programs left out, as well as the moral issues they wanted us to evaluate. They paid special attention to stories in which events were the natural result of choices people made in their lives, and we talked about those choices and how they affected the people in the stories. They pointed out the people working to make a difference and encouraged us to do the same. My sister and I spent long hours one year working at a campaign headquarters so the election news would be more meaningful to us. If we showed interest in a park clean-up story on the news, we found a similar event to become involved in ourselves. When a story affected us personally, we were taught how to circulate a petition, and I was taken to the City Council meeting to present the petition and the solution those I met during the task had come up with to save a popular and unusual park.

When we actually did watch commercials, my parents taught us to evaluate what the commercials were really saying, or in many cases, not saying. A cigarette commercial, still allowed on television in those days, showed lots of very healthy young adults playing sports and having fun. My father reminded us of a relative dying of emphysema and asked us what we knew about the health risks of smoking. He asked why we thought the commercial makers showed everyone young, healthy and athletic. What were they trying to make us think smoking would do for us? When a commercial said four out of five people preferred something, he asked us what four people out of which five, pointing out that they could have pre-polled people until they found four who agreed and one who didn’t, and then only polled them to get the results. He showed us the commercial offered no background material on the quality of the research. He also explained that they gave these statistics hoping we’d cave in to peer pressure and want to be like all the other people.

When I first started reading articles about television watching being a mindless activity, I was confused. It wasn’t until I visited other homes and was shushed when I tried to analyze the programs that I realized most people didn’t talk all the way through the program. My parents could turn anything into a teaching moment, and they felt that if we insisted on watching television, we should learn to watch it with our brains on. Not only did we watch the programs intelligently, but we actually studied television. When we moved to California, we were taken to watch television programs being filmed. My father had worked many years in a television studio and explained how programs were created and what the role of sponsors was. We read articles about television, how programs were chosen, how the ratings system worked and how commercials were chosen and placed.

The upside is that we learned to do everything thoughtfully and to monitor what someone else was trying to make us believe. We were taught to be in control, to choose wisely and to choose which messages to allow into our minds. The downside. . . no one will watch television with me!