Over a year, then, children spend more time watching television than they do going to school or pursuing any other form of leisure activity. One observer has suggested that no other activity except sleep consumes so much time as watching television. Studies of children's viewing preferences indicate that they choose programs that entertain rather than educate. Children's favorite programs are cartoons, westerns, animal and crime dramas, and family situation comedies. Commercials, too, are a favorite with preschoolers.
Children spend a lot of their viewing time on programs intended primarily for adults.
In terms of time spent and probably in terms of influence, television has to be ranked with family, school, and church as one of the powerful forces shaping our children's hopes, fears, tastes, and ambitions. Of course there are problems and perhaps undesirable results involved with a child viewing television, but there also are some positive points to consider. Television appears to enlarge the vocabulary of preschool children. But any vocabulary differential derived from television soon disappears under the impact of school training, so this language learning does not constitute a long-range advantage. From her study of television viewing and the preschool child, a leading researcher has concluded that never before have preschool children had such a broad range of experiences beyond the horizons of their own homes.