8. Out of the Box
by Martin Large
Do you suffer from information fatigue syndrome? Consider your daily bombardment by television, e-mail, news, faxes and advertising. On average we are exposed to 2500 advertising messages each day, a deluge of information. At the same time there is the rise of such TV and computer related phenomena as RSI, stress, eye strain, couch potatoes, childhood obesity, attention deficit disorder and other learning disabilities. Even Ted Turner, of CNN said at the launch of his new Customs News service, that the information smog had gone too far, saying, 'It's killing people'.
And there is more to come as technology becomes ever more sophisticated, prices fall and access widens. Over 70% children in Britain have TVs and videos in their bedrooms. Consider the widespread use of hand held video games, CD ROMs and internetted computers, the arrival of potentially 200 digital TV channels and hand held mobile telephone/computers!
One conclusion from all this is that the information technologies are no longer part of our environment: they are the environment for many people. An event does not really happen unless it is on TV. And there are huge battles going on for commercial dominance of TV and the internet, as companies realise the power of these electronic media 'to deliver people's minds'. The dizzy rise of the share prices of loss-making internet companies shows the stakes are high.
Yet, there is also a gathering backlash against the electronic media and their cultural domination. Whilst useful and enjoyable on occasion, computers and TV can be so boring, 'a medium for muggles' rather than wizards as Harry Potter might say! Children love good stories Harry Potter has sold over 27 million! And let's own up, we all love stories, and perhaps this explains some of the mesmeric effect of television. As Thomas Moore writes, 'We are a people in desperate need of stories, so needy that we don't care much about the value of the story, as long as it absorbs our attention and stirs our emotions.'
So, storytelling is making a big comeback all over the Western world, together with puppetry, the visual and the performing arts. One reason for this is that parents and teachers are saying it's not good enough to talk about the impact of the electronic, commercial media on our children, to sit around TV bashing! So, for example, some Pine Hill Waldorf School parents have created an annual Fathers Day festival on the third Sunday in June for families, called the Joseph Campbell Festival of Myth, Folklore and Story. This festival celebrates myth, fairy tales, good stories, poems, dance and song, and is so enjoyable that families come to it from miles around.
Such events encourage people to become more creative in their everyday lives: to try storytelling with their children, go to movement classes, nurture their creative spark. And as children learn from their parents, spark is important. Remember Roald Dahl's Danny who said that, 'My father, without the slightest doubt was the most marvellous and exciting father any boy ever had.' Danny suggests to the children reading the book that, 'When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: a stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is sparky.'
Teachers and schools also need to be sparky! Schools are challenged by students who increasingly do not respond well to traditional teaching methods. Visionary teachers want to provide learning pathways for students that engage the will, activate creativity and which offer experiential learning rather than sedentary classroom forms of learning.
For example, in Stroud, Gloucestershire, the pioneering Ruskin Mill Further Education Course has been so successful in engaging maladjusted 16/17-year-olds in a practical, arts, crafts and environmentally based curriculum that parents are asking for this active approach to education for their 'normal' teenagers! So a Waldorf College is to be established in Autumn 2000 using the whole community as a learning environment, with students negotiating their own curriculum with a foundation of core learning activities.
So how do TV and the VDU/cathode ray screen media affect children?
Some helpful information on how the electronic media affect young children's senses will be presented. These media are here to stay, and both parents and school need to make their own free decisions on media use.
Firstly, every child is affected by TV in different ways, depending on their personality, their temperament, constitution and age. The younger the child, the more susceptible and less able to make choices about switching off. Some active children just walk away from the TV! Others are caught at once.
Here I will concentrate on the effect of TV watching, regardless of content on the development of the senses and nervous systems of young children.
William Wordsworth wrote of his experience when as a boy:
There was a time when meadow grove and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
On growing older, the poet observed: 'The things which I have seen I now can see no more;' The youth who perceives 'the vision splendid... [of nature]... at length, [as a] man, perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.'
When we consider the openness of babies and infants to all that happens, to their powers of absorption and selfless imitation, we can appreciate the vital part played by their senses. Just as food nourishes the physical organism, so the experiences of touch, warmth, movement, sight, sound, taste, smell and well-being bring the world to the attention of the child. The exercise of the senses also nourishes the central nervous system and the brain, which enables the developing child to wake up into the world around her.
When children are brought up in an environment where their senses cannot develop in a healthy way, they do not thrive, as for example in orphans. Children who are cuddled, played with, conversed with and who experience a stimulating home life are more likely to thrive.
Our sensory experiences support our ideas, feeling and actions, even our sense of identity. This was shown dramatically in experiments with volunteers undergoing 'sensory deprivation' conditions, as a preparation for manned space flights in the United States. People floated motionless in water at blood heat, in total silence, wearing goggles that totally excluded light, and gloves which reduced the sense of touch. Initially, many volunteers fell asleep. On waking, some experienced hallucinations, fantasies, dreams, and distorted impressions of their bodies, as, for example, their arms or legs growing and floating away. Such experiments demonstrated how vital normal sensory experience is to maintain a balanced state of mind.
Given the importance of healthy sense experience for our normal functioning, and the far more vivid nature of children's sense experience, what effects does television-watching have on sensory development?
When watching television, a young child may be in a darkened room - the light of day is screened out. He is motionless, which is an uncharacteristic state for a child whose natural condition is one of continual play activity and movement. (An athlete reputed to have imitated all the actions of a two-year-old was exhausted in a short time - the child, however, was still as fresh as a daisy.) Whilst watching television the child is sitting down, the eyes are fixed, hardly move and are slightly defocused.
The senses used to watch television are sight and hearing. The other senses are largely unnecessary. Children who are playing and active will have more opportunities to develop their senses than children spending the same time watching television. 'Television' children may find it harder to 'come to their senses' having been deprived of a rich sensory diet.
A common reaction of someone discovering that my own children rarely watched television was, 'What do you do instead? What do you watch? Aren't you depriving them of so many experiences?'
They did not understand that television is a second-hand experience. I believe that for children an ounce of real experience is worth a ton of second-hand experience! This point was well made in a cartoon showing a child watching a sunset on television, whilst exactly the same sunset could be seen through the window. Or a mother switching off the computer, inviting her child to go and join the great interactive game of life.
To nourish the development of young children's senses is simple. They need to touch and feel the textures around them. Infants go through a stage of 'playing with their food'. By imitating the activities of adults, such as sweeping, baking, gardening and tidying, infants discover the everyday world. All the varied activities in home and garden, at the seaside, of building things, of playing games such as 'mums and dads', 'hospitals' or 'trains' - all call on the senses.
Children deprived of rich sensory experiences need to have play therapy in the nursery school. Teachers may have to put such children through a crash 'course' of such activities as water play, sand play, feeling things and mixing dough. This phenomenon of the 'play-deprived child' has been observed by many nursery teachers. They say that play-deprivation is not primarily connected with a child's socio-economic background, but rather with the amount of television-watching in the family.
Whilst many people may concede that excessive television-watching can deprive children of more healthy sense experiences, they may not readily agree that television-watching is sensory deprivation. However, this was demonstrated dramatically by psychologists Fred and Merrelyn Emery, who compared brainwave patterns of television viewers to those undergoing lengthy sensory deprivation. The brainwave patterns on the electroencephalograph showed that a person watching television for a few minutes was as seriously affected as someone subjected to a period of ninety-six hours sensory deprivation.
The twelve senses
Traditionally, there were five senses attributed to the human being, plus a 'sixth' sense added by hearsay. Physiologists have included a few more, such as the senses of balance and of movement, whilst several 'social senses' such as the 'sense of identity', or a 'sense of language and meaning' have been suggested. Each sense provides us with a window on the world, and we experience reality through a 'circle' of such windows as we pay more attention to one sense and then another.
The more bodily senses give us an immediate experience of our organism. Balance enables us to experience our bodies in space; touch sketches the boundary of our skin; the sense of life tells us how we are feeling - whether we are well or out of sorts, and the sense of movement brings the perception of the motions of the body's muscles, limbs or joints. Balance, touch, movement and well-being involve us deeply in our own bodily experiences - we trust what these senses tell us.
The senses of taste and smell enable us to find out about substances outside our bodies - in very personal ways since each person develops her own 'sense of taste'. With sight we perceive colours, light and shade in our surroundings. For many people, 'seeing is believing', although more doubting people, like St. Thomas, may rely on their sense of touch for conclusive information. Another sense, the sense of warmth, tells us about relationships between warmer and colder things in the environment - about whether we ourselves are gaining or losing warmth from the surroundings.
Whilst sight and warmth take us into the environment, the sense of hearing enables us to penetrate into the heart of things. The tone of a bell informs us about the quality of such materials from which it is made. The eyes may be deceived in trying to discover the material of which an object is made, but if it produces a sound, any deception is uncovered and we recognise if it is made of plastic, metal or wood.
Since the sense of hearing enables us to communicate with other people, it is above all a social sense. It is complemented by other 'social senses' which, whilst difficult to pin down physiologically, yet are essential if a person is to participate in social life. There is the sense of word, which enables us to perceive the gestures, movements and patterns which are shaped by a speaker into a stream of sounds. This sense gives us a 'feeling for language', and even if we do not understand what is being said we recognise that it 'makes sense' and is not gibberish.
Lastly, there is a subtle sense of 'feel' for the other as a person, as an identity, which can be experienced when 'making contact' with someone. These latter three senses of hearing, of word and of the sense of the 'I' of another person are very dependent on social life for their development and conversely without these there is no social life to develop them.
In the course of growing up through school, the different senses need to be nurtured more strongly according to the children's stages of development. Many activities in play groups and Kindergartens are usually practical - such as household tasks, cooking, constructing things, simple arts and crafts. Materials, substances, playthings and an environment of a sound kind have a positive influence, since it is through the senses that the world around is taken up into the child's experience - hence the importance of first-hand experiences with honest materials. Such an early environment creates security of trust in the world, for life. If children experience materials or objects which are a kind of lie - removed from real first-hand experience - then this produces an insecurity in the child, especially in trusting what the senses bring to him.
In the primary and middle schools, children need to be exercised artistically if their senses are to be fully developed. Through painting, which is of crucial importance to children, the world of colour, movement and warmth becomes a central experience for them. Music, language, art and poetry exercise the finer senses, whilst modelling or crafts enliven particularly the 'will' senses of movement, touch and balance. For it is artistic activities which awaken and develop the senses in a healthy way. Children need to experience the beauty of the world.
At secondary level, when teenagers become much more able to perceive in a detached way, science may help the capacity for accurate, objective observation to develop. The arts - especially if used in a social way as in modern drama teaching - may be of real help in exploring relationships and in awakening the social senses. Above all, teenagers need the experience that 'the world is true'.
Television's effects on the senses
Young children, in the process of discovering the world, are faced with the problem of 'sensing' if television pictures are 'real' or not, if there is in fact a man in the box or if the screen is a window on a different world. Reports of certain primitive people's responses to cinema films - of being very concerned about where the actor has gone once he leaves the screen - demonstrate the initial confusion technology has on unsophisticated adults. From this we can envisage how puzzling television must be to children who are just becoming aware of the differences and variety of sensory experience. My three-year-old son asked, 'Is there really an orchestra in the box?' or 'Is that man really dead?'
Television is a deceptive medium to place in reach of children as they are learning to find their way in the everyday world and are developing a general 'sense' of its reality. Think of the contrast between live puppets and a show produced on the TV screen. The live performance holds children spellbound, they can see the puppets and can enter the 'make-believe' world of the story in a complete and uncontradictory way. But television puts over a vast number of images, people, and happenings that are second-hand reproductions of things taking place at a distance. Furthermore many events happening on the screen - the technical tricks, the cartoon antics, all the artificial unusualness used to attract the viewer - cannot take place in real life.
So young children are faced with a 'real world' which they need to get used to through the normal development of the senses, and a television world where events happen which are unknown and often impossible in everyday life.
A mother described an incident with her five-year-old stepdaughter who is a tele-addict:
About six months ago she ran into the road and was hit by a car, and fortunately escaped with one bruise and shock. A few hours after the accident she asked me what had happened and I explained, telling her that she was a very lucky girl. I asked, 'What would have happened if you had fallen under the wheels?' and she answered, 'I'd jump up again like the Pink Panther!'
One father, on taking his young son to the zoo was so disturbed by such comments as 'I've already seen all this on television!' that he got rid of television altogether. Reality, he concluded, cannot compete with a box which shows close-ups of tigers, lions and rhinos, scenes which one never meets in ordinary life in such rapid succession. He also felt that television was dulling his child's sense of wonder.
Television and sight
Television affects our sense of sight. Its organ, the eye, responds to colour, light and darkness on the one hand and movement on the other. In fact, movement and balance - two other distinct senses - are intimately connected with the eye. One's eye is in continual movement, busy gauging distance, height and depth which are the essential elements of perspective. The eyes are perpetually fixing objects in their vision, accommodating and shifting their focus. It takes time to learn how to perceive objects, for example, a two-year-old will recognise again a triangle that has been rotated 120 degrees, only after rotating his head also - visual exploration is therefore a prerequisite of seeing.
In adults, perception is dependent on all kinds of exploratory eye movements, from consciously directed ones to involuntary small ones which shift the image over the fovea when the eye seems fixated on a motionless object. Interestingly, in the context of television's effects on the eye, when such scanning motions are artificially suppressed, the image breaks up into fragments. We need to 'finger over the visual field with our gaze' as one physiologist observed.
Constant eye movement is required for a healthy eye. Lack of eye movement may be a symptom of ageing, and eye specialists can give exercises to help older people keep their eyes 'young'.
For focusing we need conscious attention, vigilance and concentration; in short, we have to exert ourselves to co-operate with the faculties this sense provides for us.
Attention is needed for good observation and focalisation. William James wrote that 'everyone knows what attention is... Focalisation, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, "scatterbrained state" which in French is called distraction'. Such attention requires effort and cannot be 'sustained for more than a few seconds at a time'.
Television-watching is a visually passive activity. One's head is stationary, the eyes are practically motionless and do not continually move to get 'fixes' on objects as for normal sight, and they are slightly 'defocused' to take in the whole screen. The accent is on peripheral vision rather than on central vision which is active in the state of attention described above. Another effect is that, whilst watching television one's eye muscles are not being exercised and one's vigilance is decreased through the necessary defocusing of the eyes. There is little need for accommodating eye movement - or rather, this is kept at a constant level to make up for the nature of television which is a slightly blurred, low definition medium (compared with the clearer image of cinema films, for example). Some ophthalmologists recommend TV viewing for post-operative eye patients, just to keep the eyes stilled.
Apart from affecting the eye's mechanics in such a drastic fashion, television affects people's attention. The Emerys maintain that television both 'destroys the capacity of the viewer to attend' and also 'by taking over a complex of direct and indirect neural pathways, decreases vigilance'. They say that the television-watching state of mind is a form of distraction, as opposed to concentration and focalisation.
Furthermore, the Emerys write that in spite of the high volume of content coming from the television, the mechanics of eye and brain receive this input as if it were a simple visual stimulus. Television is therefore an impoverished sensory environment.
The foregoing arguments may lead to the conclusion that television affects children's vigilance, attention and concentration adversely.
So far we have been discussing effects applying specifically to the mature senses of adults. But how does television affect babies' and toddlers' developing sense of sight?
The perceptual world is not a finished product which is the same for everyone, but it is shaped according to a person's age. Children's experiences happen in a vivid world in which things are attractive and repulsive before they focus into abstract qualities like squareness or blackness. Piaget showed how optical illusions decrease with age, and how children's perception of space develops. For the first few months objects do not 'exist' if they are not moving or doing something. Holding or manipulating an object gives it reality, and when it disappears, it is gone for good. Space, like 'mouth space' or 'grasping space', is separate and related to activity.
At the eighth to tenth month, the object is seen to be more independent. Piaget offered a watch to a nine-month-old who played with it. When it was hidden under a pillow, the baby fetched it. Even though the baby saw the watch being hidden in a different place the second time he still looked in the first hiding place.
At about sixteen months, the toddler perceives the object as having permanence independent of himself. Space becomes a field in which things happen, as opposed to being bound up with activity. Perhaps the game of 'peek-a-boo' is a way for babies and toddlers to get used to seeing loved ones come and go, yet still feeling they are 'there'.
The sense of sight continues to develop, and it is only at around the age of eleven to twelve that the sense for perspective emerges. From the standpoint of perceptual development, therefore, television may seriously harm the acquiring of such concepts as space by infants. Furthermore, the two-dimensional screen inhibits the development of a sense of depth and perspective.
Listening and observing
Kindergarten teachers are saying they have to teach children to listen. Although most children love stories, their attention span seems shorter and a minority find it hard to listen at all. But as soon as such children begin to make their own inner gesture-like 'pictures' of the story, they are able to listen; however, teachers comment on how much better story-tellers they need to be nowadays to hold children's attention.
Presumably, the background sound of radio, cassette or television at home is so prevalent that the sense of hearing is dulled. Since television is more visual than aural, and unless adults converse with children and tell them stories, children's sense of hearing is not being fully exercised. One piece of research showed that 25 years ago the average person could distinguish between 300,000 sounds; now it is only 180,000, reflecting an ongoing decrease in the brain's sensitivity.
Observational skills may also not be developed by viewing - hence the need to help children see flowers, animals, and birds. Many infant, Kindergarten and junior teachers I know have observed a 'withdrawal' from the senses in moderate and heavy-viewing children. They therefore need to teach therapeutically to cultivate the ability to 'see a world in a grain of sand'.
Movement and balance
Some older teachers can still distinguish the 'viewers' from 'non-viewers' in a class, by their posture, limb control and how they sit. Audrey McAllen, a special education advisor, wrote on movement and television:
After many years of working with children who have learning difficulties one sees clearly how unconnected the present-day child is with the interaction of hands and limbs. They do not bother to lift their legs high enough to throw a ball under them, the hand collides with the thigh. Also the left leg seems heavier than the right and harder for them to lift. When classes have been screened for learning problems, this symptom of limb heaviness is now general among children.
And you can experience this 'limb heaviness' for yourself after watching TV. Perhaps this is why there are currently so many popular types of movement class for adults such as Tai Chi or yoga: to counteract the effects of computer work and our sedentary lifestyle, for example.
The movement sense gives us the feeling of having a reason to be here, a sense of purpose developed from wanting to go from one place to another. This sense enables us, through our muscles to perceive if we are still or moving, and where our body is in space. Young children subtly imitate the movements in their environment, resonating, for example, to electronic movements. Learning to walk, to develop dexterity and co-ordination all relate to the movement sense.
So cramping movement through TV and computers can have disruptive affects: consider hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder, and forms of dyslexia when letters move up and down in the visual field. Dr Harry Levinson treats certain forms of dyslexia and hyperactivity with travel sickness pills. These children, he thinks, suffer from a kind of 'motion sickness'. Certain children's ability to read increases remarkably after taking these pills, because the disturbed sense of movement is calmed down.
Alan Hall, a physicist investigating electromagnetic fields, noticed the effects of rapidly oscillating, low level electromagnetic fields coming from computers and TVs: 'When one comes within two feet or 18 inches, one can feel the muscles tighten up slightly, and over time a feeling of "electrostress".' So think how such subtle oscillations can effect balance and movement in young children, going from your own direct experience, he suggests.
Balance is also affected by TV watching. And how many times do adults say they want to find balance in their lives! Balance is centred in the inner ear, sensing the pull of the earth, it gives us a sense of uprightness. It gives us a bodily, grounded reference point, a feeling of inner calm and security in space. So think of the modern dizzy pace of life and how this can knock us off balance!
Achieving balance is a major achievement for infants, as well as that of standing upright, free to start moving as an independent being in the world. Cheryl Sanders stresses that balance disorders, resulting from things like viewing, can have devastating affects on children: 'The disruption of balance causes a certain sinking feeling in the stomach, a dizziness that might be familiar to spinning about 10 or twelve times, then trying to walk straight. Imagine if this feeling were present every time you wanted to read, or write. What if the feeling were more subtle, so that you could not figure out what it was, but you knew you were feeling awful when at school, especially in some classes, but not in others like art or music... and what if lack of co-ordination was extended to any attempt to participate in games, or even just trying to run across the playground without being laughed at?'
Television closes down the human nervous system
The Emerys propose that 'television as a simple, constant, repetitive and ambiguous visual stimulus gradually closes down the nervous system of man'. In an adult's brain the left and right hemispheres have distinct, specialised functions. Each hemisphere governs the activities of the opposite side of the body. The right hemisphere, for instance, controls the movements of your left hand.
The 'critical' left brain can process one stimulus at a time. This leads to orderly thought sequences, linear thinking, analysis, distinguishing parts. The verbal and logical functions are important. The right brain can process whole clusters of stimuli at once, leading to a grasp of a complex wholes - such as a face. The processes of thinking in images and pictures are important. As mentioned previously, viewing tunes out the left brain. According to the Emerys, in adults subjected to electroencephalographs, whilst watching television, the left hemisphere is hardly active at all, registering a minimal holding pattern. They suggest that 'viewing is at the conscious level of somnambulism'. The right hemisphere does register the television images, although since the cross-referencing of our subconscious intelligence between left and right has been 'knocked out', these cannot easily be brought to consciousness. Hence the difficulty most people have in recalling much information from a programme.
Other researchers into brainwave patterns whilst watching television confirm the Emerys' findings. Dr Eric Pepper is a Professor of Interdisciplinary Sciences at San Francisco State University. He claims '...that the alpha wave patterns which rapidly become dominant whilst watching are a sign of being in a totally passive condition and being unaware of the world outside of the pictures which one is seeing.' The right phrase for alpha patterns is really 'spaced-out'. Not orienting. 'When someone pays attention to something external, such alpha patterns disappear.'
Babies have unspecialized brains. Indeed, it is only at about twelve that the left and right sides are fully specialised. Babies seem to have some sort of 'non-verbal thought': for example, they recognise human faces. In the second year, toddlers learn to speak, and language comes to the fore. At this time each brain hemisphere is apparently equally mature; lesions on the left side are no more harmful to language development than on the right side, and vice versa. Similar lesions in the left hemispheres of adults might cause significant linguistic problems.
As language develops, the brain specialises into the two hemispheres of verbal and or non-verbal thinking. Learning increasingly comes from verbal activities.
However, television in the early years when the brain is so malleable and sensitive, prolongs the dominance of the non-verbal 'right hemisphere' functions. The trance-like state of many child viewers, especially if induced for 20-30 hours per week, may seriously inhibit the development of the verbal-logical 'left hemisphere' activities.
Furthermore, children exposed to television - a medium which prolongs the dominance of non-verbal 'right' hemisphere activities - may not take full advantage of the special 'language sensitive' period of influence. Just as there are 'tides in the affairs of men' so there are tides of 'readiness' in the child's development, for example, language readiness. If a child does not learn to speak during this period of readiness, it may be hard for her to make up for this deficiency later on.
Health visitors and speech therapists are concerned about the increasing numbers of young children who can hardly speak. What appear to be speech impairments, are in fact children who have had little family conversation, no nursery rhymes, and whose parents prefer dummies (pacifiers) and television.
When neurologists such as Dr Eric Pepper assert that 'television trains people only for being zombies' - it may be time to ask: 'Do we want this state of consciousness to be induced in our children?'
To conclude, viewing at an early age may hinder the development of the senses, such as light, hearing, balance, movement - and, indeed, offers us a poor sensory diet. Over-stimulated, children may 'withdraw from their senses', and need therapeutic exercises. The patterning the brain needs for language development is hindered by viewing.
However, given the extensive research on the effects of viewing on young children, it is up to parents and school to make up their own minds. And at a time when there are so many creative alternatives, families are voting with their feet! However, schools are challenged as well to put more spark into learning. I remember a Waldorf colleague answering a parent asking him about whether she should be concerned about her child's viewing: 'Over the next few months, your daughter will grow out of most of her viewing, as she gets involved in all the creative work we do!' In other words, a lively family and school life is enough to get children 'out of the box'.
Martin Large lectured in management and behavioural science for many years in higher education. He works as a facilitator in participative planning, community building, and learning. He is the author of Who's Bringing Them Up?
Contact:
Hawthorn Press,
Hawthorn House,
1 Lansdown Lane,
Stroud, Glos. GL5 1BJ
Tel: (01453) 757040
Fax: (01453) 751138
Web: Hawthorn Press
E-mail: mhclarge(at)aol.com
References
Fred and Merrelyn Emery, A Choice of Futures - To Enlighten or Inform No.ACP 2600 1975, Centre for Continuing Education, Australian National University.
Jane M. Healey, Endangered Minds Touchstone, New York, 1990.
Martin Large, Who's Bringing Them Up? How to kick the T.V. habit Hawthorn Press, Stroud, Second edition 1992.
H. N. Levinson, M.D., A Scientific Watergate, Dyslexia Stonebridge Publishing Ltd, Lake Success, New York 1994.
Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life Hodder, London 1996. Cheryll Sanders, in the Foreword to Games Children Play Kim Brooking-Payne, Hawthorn Press, Stroud, UK 1996.
A. Soesman, The Twelve Senses Hawthorn Press, Stroud 1996.