Are children of today fed through a TV screen?

A friend of mine told me her nephew asked her what coincidence meant. Now I understand that is a harmless word, however, how many 5 year olds do you know asking you that? When asked where he heard that word - we expected to here him say at school - he said he heard someone say it on telly.

This brings me to my question, as a nation are we bringing up children to be fed by a television.

I understand brining up young children can be hard and there is a temptation to place them in front of the telly so you can get on with what you need to and they can be quiet for a few hours. However, with so many things on TV its hard to control what children watch. Not to mention the amount of TV available on the internet.

Yet it's not always the TV show itself which could be harmful, as that you can control. For example if your child flicks onto E4 and catches 2 Broke Girls which contains 'cheeky adult humour' you can simply change the channel to something you feel is more appropriate. It's the things you can't control thats worrying; the adverts.

I'll give you another example. On youtube you could type in something harmless say a song which your child likes such as Happy by Pharrell Williams - who doesn't like thats song? - and then once that ends a few suggestions come up. Whats to stop your child clicking on that? Then they click something else then something else and before you know it they could be watching something containing graphic imagery.

This is something which is actually a possible concern. I'm not saying we should rule out TV for all children. However, maybe we could try and control it through the help of the internet controls being more easy to use. At the end of the day, we need to ensure we don't raise a age of TV addicts who turn to the internet and TV for all kinds of entertainment. Before you know it we are living like the people in Wall-E not walking but floating around in chairs.