Geração perdida? A televisão será mesmo um perigo para as crianças? Em excesso, sim - é o que apontam diversos estudos que têm vindo a ser realizados, abrangendo desde os efeitos fisiológicos até às dificuldades de aprendizagem ou de socialização. Um texto publicado hoje no Guardian ("Is television destroying our children's minds?") levanta questões pertinentes sobre este assunto. Aqui ficam alguns excertos: "Should parents worry about what television is doing to their children? Is it making them fatter, stupider, more violent? After all, TV has changed since today's parents were children. It's bigger, brasher and on all the time". "The content of the programmes and videos that children watch must be significant. (...) We also need to give consideration to the notion of "watching television", which might well be qualitatively very different for different children. Some might be gormlessly staring at nothing very much; others making important visual judgments". "So is watching TV a bad thing for under-twos? The research suggests no more than that it could be, while never really tackling the issue of how much TV viewing among toddlers would be regarded as excessive. Ten hours a day might be too much, but what about one hour of Teletubbies watched, in the traditional manner, with mother? Would that be a bad thing? As far as I could discover, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the anti-TV rhetoric and the plausibility of the data upon which it is based. What is also certain is that any such research is going to get a great deal of attention because so many people stand to make a lot of money out of children - programme-makers, soft-toy producers and Ritalin manufacturers among them. Not to mention all those people writing apocalyptic texts that pander to the panic of parents worried that they are raising goggle-eyed sociopaths, thanks to the chattering cyclops".