Please Keep Your Clumsy Children Away From Our Precious TVs

NPR published a post yesterday detailing the results of a study about the dangers TV poses to children -- not in terms of the programming it serves, but the damage the actual physical TV hardware can do to children. TVs are, of course, ubiquitous in the home, irresistible to children, and heavy, which is how they can injure youngsters: "[a]bout every 30 minutes," according to NPR's report, "a child ends up in the emergency room with injuries caused by a television." This statistic is terrible, of course; for a child to suffer a traumatic experience and associate that pain with a TV forever is a tragedy we all should strive to avoid. But I would be remiss if I did not respond to this story by speaking up for the other victims whose suffering is going unnoticed. I must speak up for the TVs.

When a child comes into contact with a TV, even one that isn't on, his or her impulse is to touch it, because his or her impulse is to touch everything. It doesn't matter if your TV's pristine screen has never been had contact with anything except a dry, extremely soft cloth, or that the child's hands are covered in jam and Teddy Grahams dust: a child doesn't know that a TV is an indispensible friend to the household, delivering news and entertainment uncomplainingly to the grateful residents with whom it shares a home, and that it will function best if it isn't crusted with saliva and grit.

A child, after all, has the free will to discover the world hands-on, literally -- to explore all that he or she encounters with all of his or her senses. A TV does not have that luxury. All that a TV can do, when its very existence is threatened, is hope that a responsible adult will intervene to keep it safe and allow it to continue performing the purpose for which God Himself placed it on this earth.

And if a responsible adult is not present when an inquisitive child sees fit to molest it, what is a TV to do? A TV has no voice with which to protest -- just the voices we rely on it to broadcast. A TV lacks the ambulatory power to depart the child's presence and monitor (as it were) the child's actions from a safe remove. Nay: if a TV is menaced by an aggressive, heedless child, the only recourse that TV has is to crush that child. And yet, when that does happen -- on relatively rare occasions and in self-defense -- the TV is made out to be the villain.

Furthermore, in such a situation, the child is brought to the hospital, as the NPR report states. What of the TV? The odds are that it cannot be repaired; it can only be replaced. The child has, in effect, forced the TV into such a position that the only way out is suicide.

Children may be the future, like the song says. But TVs are the present, and the present is a gift, and if your little Tanner doesn't want me to show up at his next birthday party and kick all his presents in, then he should give my TVs a wide berth.