“Does TV harm our children?”

Evening Times – Aug. 10, 1966

By: Danny Kaye

How does television affect children? I don’t know. How does ANYTHING affect children? How many thousands of different things affect children? There was no television when I was a boy, but I know I must have been affected by vaudeville, the theatre, movies, books, comic strips (except that we called them the funny papers)—and above all by people and situations and circumstances. Life, they call it.

In the time of my grandparents, children were thrilled and chilled by Grimm’s fairy tales—and grim they were, and fairy tales they were also. The elders of the time certainly threw up their hands in horror at the violence of Grimm.

To-day, Walt Disney is heralded as one of the great storytellers of our time—which indeed he is. But what do we see with a Walt Disney film? We see horror and violence, after which good triumphs over evil. My daughter Dena had nightmares for a whole year after she saw “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

I hold that neither Grimm nor Disney are the culminating factors in the definition of a child’s personality. I think we should throw neither rocks nor puffs at them, but accept the fact that Grimm existed in his time, and Disney does very well in our time.

We talk about juvenile delinquency when perhaps we should talk about ADULT delinquency. We talk about parents’ responsibility and we forget that many people actually are not fit to be parents in the first place.

Gangs not all evil

Apparently there is supposed to be some sort of magical osmosis that takes place the instant two people become parents. At that instant they suddenly become all-knowing in the ways of bringing up and guiding and teaching and inspiring children.

We think only of teaching our children when actually we can and should learn from our children.

Children are, I think, a good deal more intelligent, sensible, analytical, and understanding than we give them credit for being. If there is violence on television there is also violence in life. It is my growing suspicion that most children not only understand this but appreciate the subtle difference between storytelling and reality.

Is it fair or even intelligent to point the finger at television and cry out—“Television is full of violence and horror and is bad for our children?”

Juvenile delinquency and television are too often mentioned in the same breath. I am frequently asked what I think about juvenile delinquency because I was raised in Brooklyn in the middle of Murder, Inc., and this apparently makes me an expert on the subject. I am not an expert. I don’t even know that I am well-informed. But I constantly hear the word “gang” and it has become a dirty word.

I was a member of a gang in Brooklyn—a gang of kids who used to get together to sing harmony. Across the street there was a gang of kids who used to lean against the wall, cigarettes hanging out of the corners of their mouths—really tough kids. To-day we call them juvenile delinquents.

My only point is that not all kids are juvenile delinquents, not all gangs are evil, not all television is a bad influence on children . . . most certainly not all entertainers.

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