How to Bring Up a TV Achiever

My 2-year-old son and I are constantly fighting over his daily intake of television. It always ends the same--kicking, screaming, crying and then everyone has to take a nap. It’s tearing our family apart, and the time has come for stern measures.

I’m an advocate of tough love, especially for other people, and I intend to do whatever is necessary to end my son’s dysfunctional relationship with the television set. Accordingly, I’ve decreed that he begin watching more television. A lot more. We’ll start with six consecutive hours per day. Up from the four minutes he can now tolerate.

I’m not fooling around here. If I have to borrow the strap-him-down and pin-his-eyes-back tactics from “A Clockwork Orange,” so be it. No juice breaks, no snack breaks, no bathroom breaks--not that that’s actually an issue yet.

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I realize my decree’s timing is at odds with the just-ended National TV Turnoff Week, a campaign endorsed by the U.S. surgeon general. But Dr. David Satcher called on kids to click off the set and “go bicycling, play soccer, jump rope, fly a kite, dance, start a garden, wash the dog, swim laps, clean your room, do gymnastics, throw a Frisbee, learn to roller skate, [or] build a fort.”

Yeah, right. You think that’s going to get them into Harvard? I would never waste my son’s potential by letting him “wash the dog.” (We don’t even have one so he won’t be tempted to stray from the TV set.)

Actually, if the surgeon general’s kid is out flying a kite or jumping rope, that’s fine with me. It just means that my son will be hiring and firing his progeny someday. You think kite fliers and rope jumpers run the world? You think Bill Gates threw a Frisbee?

Pudgy, pasty Gates got where he is by goggling a screen for hours on end. That’s a discipline, people. It takes skill--one founded upon television. In the future, if you can’t stare at a screen for at least 10 hours without blinking, you might as well head to unemployment.

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As it is now, you can barely escape the screen. Today, workers sit 18 inches from a computer screen all day, then race home so they can glue themselves in front of the TV.

If you’re away from home, it’s no different. Bars, malls, Jumbo-trons, hotel bathrooms. If you can already buy a hand-held TV, where do you think we’ll be seeing them in 10 years? Right, stapled to people’s foreheads.

Television will also be the lingua franca of his brave new world. Imagine my son after a dazzling performance in a job interview. And then in those pivotal moments of chitchat immediately afterward, one interviewer says: “Ha, this reminds me of the ‘Jackass’ episode where they fired paint balls at that guy’s groin.”

If my son doesn’t get the reference immediately, the next phrase he’ll hear is: “You are the weakest link; goodbye.”

The key to learning is to start young. I’m already pushing to get my son’s future preschool to open the nation’s first program for gifted-and-talented television watching. I don’t want my son’s television prowess “dumbed down” because his classmates can’t keep up.

I do all this with more than the future in mind. I’m also out to right a terrible wrong from the past. My past. My parents actively discouraged me from the TV. Instead of absorbing the knowledge that could have made me a “Jeopardy!” champion, they insisted I perform menial unpaid tasks around the house.

TV will be my son’s only chore. But unlike my youth, spent stealing glances at a crummy 19-inch black and white, I want my kid watching nothing less than a 50-inch HDTV. We can’t afford it, but there’s got to be TV scholarships out there somewhere.

Today, Americans watch about four hours of television a day. That’s nine years by the time they’re 65. That’s good, but I think we can do better. I know my son can--and will.