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<title> Children and television </title>
Television has a central place in children's lives today, for good and for bad. Every three-year-old knows how to switch on the TV and how to handle the remote control. Consequently, the parents have a huge responsibility to use the medium in the right way, which mainly is a question of quantity and quality. The television companies provide us with a surplus of programmes which gives us an opportunity to choose what to watch. However, choosing is difficult for children. They want to see everything. Thus it is up to their parents to decide for them. 
To begin with, the time that the children spend in front of the TV should be limited. Some children spend several hours a day watching television. Apart from the fact that children need to be physically active and that staring at a screen for a long time cannot be good for your eyes, there are also psychological risks. Too much time in front of the television can make children passive. They might loose their imagination and become unable to find something to do on their own. 
It is equally important to help children to choose what to watch. There are a lot of good children's programmes to choose from, which I will come back to later, but there are also a lot of rubbish. Too many programmes that are supposed to be for children contain a considerable amount of violence. For example, the main plot in the multicommercial series 'Pokémon' is about violent competitions between fantasy animals in a so-called 'Pokémon league', and this series is far from the worst one. 
However, if the parents manage to control the quantity and, at least to some extent, the quality of the programmes, and also provide their children with books from an early age, I think that children can benefit from watching television. While television at its worst can be addictive and causing passivity, television at its best can be educational and inspiring. Many Swedish children are incredibly well informed about the most various subjects, because of watching television. They learn about current events by watching news adapted for children, explaining in a way that children understand. They learn about science and nature not only from 'Hjärnkontoret', a Swedish science programme for children, but also from programmes aimed at adults.
Watching television also inspires children to new activities. For instance, you can often find children playing 'Gladiators' in the playgrounds nowadays, and almost every school has its own 'Ministar' competition with children imitating pop stars. Furthermore, watching sports is always inspiring for children. It is a well-known fact that when a Swedish athlete is successful in international competitions, a lot of children want to start practising that particular sport. This has in fact always been the case, but since television has made it possible to see the competitions, the phenomenon has increased.
It should be added that even programmes of better quality, for example television versions of good books, might cause passivity. Watching television is easy. You are given pictures to help you follow the plot. You never have to create your own picture of what a character look like, for example, and you are never given time to reflect on his thoughts or feelings. Getting used to this easy way of grasping a story some children might find it boring or even difficult to read a book. But it can also work the other way. My eleven-year-old son recently watched a television version of 'Sofie's World' by Jostein Gaarder that mostly covered the frame story, and not so much of the explanations of philosophy that the book provides. After that he eagerly started to read the 500 pages long book, learning about Plato, Descartes and other philosophers. 
In conclusion I think it is important that we are aware of the risks that comes with this glut of television but also of the possibilities that are provided. We have to decide for our children how much and what they are allowed to watch. If we handle this the right way, our children will grow up to become people with good all-round knowledge, otherwise we run a risk of 'losing' a generation. 
Finally, we should not forget that television is entertainment, and that it should be allowed to be that. There is nothing wrong with watching something just because it is fun.
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