Hello, and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries. My name is Kim John Payne, I'm the author of Simplicity Parenting, and so glad you could be with us. Today's theme is how to choose programs for children, how to make that discernment, you know, so your kids are getting older, you're thinking, well, maybe, you know, maybe we could have some videos, maybe we could have a Saturday night at the movies, you know, some parents feel that that's the place where they come down as a compromise with screens.
And how do you make that judgment? What is healthy, in terms of letting your kids watch and what is not? Now, the way this came up a lot for me was I was giving a workshop once, and a gentleman was fairly strong in saying, well, look, we grew up with television, and we're okay, aren't we? And I thought, you know, that's a fair point. So I took that back to a group of students at my university and told them about this, and said, you know, we should look at this, we should look into what programming was like, because my guess is that this gentleman who was talking about this was probably growing up in the 70s, you know, or so, give or take. And it wasn't the first time in by any means I'd heard this.
So we began digging into it. And we watched roughly 100 hours of children's programming from the 1970s. And then we watched roughly 100 hours of children's programming from the 2010s, and compared the two.
Now, the baseline for me was based on some peer reviewed research that basically said that in order for a child between the age of 9 and 12 to be able to absorb an image and actually make meaning of it, it was a rather complicated study, but in a nutshell, you know, make meaning of this, not be scared by it, and have it go to the amygdala in the brain, the fight or flight brain, but have it go to that sort of discerning, more executive functioning of the brain, just under four seconds. And I thought, well, that's really, that's really interesting. So we took that as a baseline, checked that out with a number of colleagues about this sort of four second thing.
And they said, yeah, yeah, that's, that's about it. And there was pretty universal agreement. So we then basically watched this programming with that in mind, and the results were fascinating to say the least.
We got a, we rolled in a audio visual equipment. And we watched it, as I said, a bunch of more modern contemporary TV, programming, computer programming, you know, gaming, all this sort of stuff. And we were intending to mark down every time the camera either panned, zoomed, changed, or as it turned out, split screen or flickered.
And with the four second rule in mind, that it takes four seconds for a child to absorb an image and not have it just simply be kind of low calorie images or empty calorie images. We couldn't actually keep up with it, we had to get the AV guy in just to give us the to show us how to slow it down into frames, because we couldn't mark down on our papers quickly enough, how many times the images were changing. It was so rapid, very, very, very fast.
And it left us looking at each other thinking, wow, four seconds for this not just to be sort of empty calorie, just junk images, or what worse, you know, just scare the kids just flickering and scary and the images that were coming across were, at times pretty intense and nasty and designed to be so. So then we took some programming from the 1970s, the thing that particularly comes to mind is Mr. Rogers. Most of the listeners in the US will remember Mr. Rogers for listeners to this podcast from other countries.
It was just this lovely, gentle man who had an enduring understanding of children's development, who produced just countless hours of programming for children, largely based around gentle storytelling, projects, recurring characters. And so we watched this. And we were there with our pens at the ready, ready to mark down all the images.
And we kind of didn't move much. The images didn't change. They didn't pan very much at all, zoom very much at all, change very much at all.
There was no flickering, no split screen. You know, Mr. Rogers would sometimes just walk away and the camera would just stay where he had been. I don't know where the cameraman was, off to the pub or something.
I don't know. But the camera would just stay where it was. And Mr. Rogers would come back and say, Oh, hello, are you still there? And on he would go, having retrieved, you know, some material that he needed for the project or whatever it was.
The basic math of it is, when we sat down to do it, was that you would have to watch 92 hours of Mr. Rogers, all packed into one, which of course you can't, unless you sped up the tape. 92 hours of Mr. Rogers to equate to one hour of modern children's television programming. It's not the same.
So what this gentleman was talking about at my workshop, at the talk, was sure enough, we did grow up with television, most of us, but it's not the same. Not even vaguely the same. Now, how does this affect our choice of programming for children, should we wish to show them television? Well, the four second rule here is a really handy way to make a judgment.
Watch the program ahead of time and make sure that the images stay on the screen and they linger three, four, five, six seconds, and then maybe a change. And sometimes the images will take 10, 15 seconds. And once or twice, perhaps the images will move a little more quickly.
But on the whole, where you have visual programming, where the images linger, and where it's slower and a slower pace, then you can be much more confident that a child is not being basically pushed back into a default fight or flight mechanism where the amygdala gets fired, because the basal ganglia in the brain, the basal ganglia being the kind of sentinel, the sort of stop, who goes there, halt, who goes there and checks out the image and says, okay, you're funny, you go there, you know, oh, that's, that's very interesting. You go to the frontal lobes, oh, that's really scary. You go to the amygdala, oh, that's, that's the basal ganglia, right? That's the sentinel who comes and checks out the images.
But when the images are flickering and, and booming and buzzing and changing and split screening, the sentinel, the basal ganglia, who comes at, who's meant to check out the images, gets overwhelmed, can't do it, can't keep up. And then basically says, I'm out of here, I cannot do this, I cannot handle this amount of visual stimulation, but before I leave, I'm going to close off all the barriers. I'm going to close off every single road I'm putting up barriers, and I'm only leaving the road open to fight or flight, to being able to, which basically is stimulating hyperactivity and stimulating defiance and really opening up pathways and enlarging pathways of the brain that all have to do with basically social and emotional problems.
Whereas if we can slow it down and slow the images down, then what we're doing is that that sentinel, that basal ganglia, that sentinel is saying, okay, I can check this out, I can cope with this, this is the amount of work I can actually do. I'm good with this and can make discernments. And so therefore, the brain functioning of a child is much more balanced.
It's sending signals to all different parts of the brain, not just to the one reptilian fight, flight, freeze or flock part of our brain. The four-second rule, largely, you'll see, applies to programming made back, guess when? Pre-80s. There's almost a kind of a shift in the 80s when images started flickering and moving fast.
Occasionally, into the 80s and early 90s, you can find simpler children's programming. But programming from the 50s, 60s and 70s, this largely adheres to the four-second rule. Now, I'm not suggesting we want to go back in time and be all sentimental about the 50s, 60s and 70s.
No, for me, I'm actually just applying modern science to what a child can actually absorb and what is healthy for them, both socially, emotionally and neurologically. Okay, well, I sure hope that is helpful. Bye-bye for now.
