Talking about Lassie (1993)

Children should feel the power not only of the written word, but of conversation as well. why Mr. Cox makes the time to talk with his sons about what they've been reading. IT IS Sunday evening. I am sitting at our kitchen table, reading papers written by high school English students -- journal entries on Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. Jackie is in the living room with our 7-year-old son. They are watching the first Star Wars movie. Liam questions the racism of the final scene, in which the Wookie and the robots are not awarded medals of honor: That's not fair, is it, Mama? She agrees, and they discuss a better ending. Another evening, I am reading J. R. R. Tolkien's Hobbit for our usual bedtime story. Bilbo and the dwarves have been captured by trolls. I stop and ask Liam, What do you think is going to happen next? He responds, The wizard's going to return. And he's right. My 7-year-old can do what many of my high school seniors are incapable of: he can make logical predictions about the development of the plot of a story, and he can critique the racial stereotyping in a film. Why does he do so easily what so many average-ability seniors either cannot do or do with difficulty? Educators and parents often scapegoat television for destroying the minds of our children, for turning them into nonreaders -- passive receivers of images and information that they consume rather than digest. But that answer is too simple. My sons can predict the outcome of each episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's going to try to get the turtles into Dimension X. They can articulate and question; they engage with television and movies just as they interact with the books we read. While it is true that neither of my children has viewed as much television as his contemporaries, both of them still see their share -- too much, in their mother's opinion. I acknowledge that children in America generally spend too much time with electronic media and too little time with books. We finally broke down when Liam was 2 and accepted his grandparents' gift of a television, fearing that our son was missing an important part of our culture by not being exposed to Sesame Street. As it turned out, his introduction to Big Bird did not impede his literacy. As members of a generation inundated with everything from Captain Kangaroo to Gilligan's Island, Jackie and I had watched many more hours of television than our children, and yet we both graduated from college with degrees in English. Our conversations are flooded with allusions to literary works, contemporary and classic. When Liam was 3, he started watching reruns of Lassie on our local PBS station. After he had watched a few episodes, we noticed that he turned off the program whenever Timmy was in danger. We were puzzled at first, but after talking with him we realized that the show was manipulating his emotions. Now he talks with his younger brother, explaining how the music in a video can make you feel sad or scared. Part of the problem is that we parents do not spend enough time engaged with our children in whatever they do. We do not encourage them to respond, to think and feel about what they see or read or listen to. We do not teach them to question the images that assault them constantly. Some of my friends who do read to their children also plant them in front of all kinds of PG-rated movies, Saturday morning cartoons, and, perhaps worst of all, prime-time sitcoms. …