The debate is as testy as it is enduring. With each resurgence it creates more of what parents already possess in overly ample servings: the guilty sense that if they were really good parents, they'd be doing a far better job of controlling their kids' lives and experiences. The debate proposition, stated in the affirmative: Resolved, spending too much time watching television makes kids--for lack of a more uncharitable word--dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

In many households this debate is a volatile one. A spouse who stakes out a position for or against stringently restricting children's TV time risks Armageddon if his or her spouse profoundly disagrees. The bet here is that even more marriages are strained by parental arguments over television than by another menacing marital scourge: the sneaky, middle-of-the-night placement of one spouse's cold feet against the other spouse's warm calves.

No academic studies have precisely measured the damage wrought by these fights over television and kids. There are, though, mountains of studies on the proposition itself--well-documented assertions that too much TV leaves children not just dumb, but violent, aggressive, obese and poorly socialized. Sure to reign eternal among the most volatile of these documents is a recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which contains plenty of evidence to outrage--and thus warmly hearten--those who condemn TV as the utter ruination of the young.

Among the study's findings:

- Children ages 6 months to 6 years spend three times as many hours watching TV as they do reading or being read to. (Being read to is an especially important variable--a measure of the warm time parents and children spend together.)

- One-third of children ages 6 and younger has televisions in their rooms.

- A similar proportion live in households where a television is on most or all of the time.

- Children in these TV-obsessed homes are much less likely than other kids to be able to read at ages 4 to 6.

Through this fog of data, two questions loom like lighthouse beacons. First, who are all these parents, the supposed life guides, who so thoroughly abdicate responsibility by allowing the TV to seize remote control of their children? Second, if television is under indictment, what about all the other "screen time" kids spend, staring into computer monitors or video games?

Whoa, here they come, righteous and right-thinking defenders of computers and video games, which they allege to be different. To be, as parents used to say of television before the word started to ring hollow, educational. Patrician defenders of computers and video games see them as more active pursuits, and thus superior to the passive, plebeian watching of too much TV.

The truth here ought to be obvious, and indeed to many parents it is: There's nothing inherently wrong with TV programming or computer software or video games, provided the content is age-appropriate and consumed in moderation.

But that moderation has to be promoted and ultimately enforced by parents, for the same reason it would be unwise--and unfair--to let a gaggle of hungry 8-year-olds have an unchaperoned sleepover in the candy aisle at Walgreen's.

That said, it may be too convenient to assert, even with the Kaiser evidence on reading ability, that what's most at risk here is children's academic development. So many factors determine who learns what, and at what age, that blaming brightly lit boxes for any sorry intellectual outcomes of the young is a little over the top.

Alvin Rosenfeld, a New York psychiatrist and an expert on children's media consumption, wants to move the debate over the amount of time kids spend watching television and in other screencentric endeavors to a higher, even more troubling plane. Rosenfeld, who treats both children and adults, says we can argue until doomsday--as all those parental assailants and defenders of television do with impunity--about the alleged effects of screen time on learning.

What can't be argued is that, for too many children, their world--the reality they know best--has only two dimensions: horizontal and vertical. Why, Rosenfeld asks, is life outside these screens so uninteresting for so many kids?

"Relationships are what make us human," says Rosenfeld, who is active in a national movement that urges families to spend more time together, and less time pursuing purely individual interests (www.nationalfamilynight.org). "How many of us," he asks, "know the characters on `Friends' better than we know real friends? For how many of us do these screen characters speak to us more personally, more intimately, than do our own friends and family members?

"Screens take over when parents fail to lead. Screens teach young people that life is about excitement--and, indirectly, that real life is boring by comparison." That's a powerful charge, and one that rings true to every well-intentioned parent who has tried to strike up a conversation with a child only to be told, "Not now. Maybe after my show's over."

It's fair for parents to complain about that--but not if their own copious servings of "Baby Einstein" videotapes unwittingly taught their children that watching a screen is more entertaining than interacting with other family members. "What sells these supposedly educational products for children is anxiety," Rosenfeld says. "How have we become so insecure about our ability to raise our own kids?"

Rosenfeld doesn't mind that his own daughter and two sons occasionally veg out in front of the tube; there is, he offers, "value in not having to think about anything."

But that is not the allocation of time he wants to come first in his children's lives. The highest priority is human interaction. Next come the intellectual imperatives--the skills and knowledge that will last young people a lifetime. If some of the time left over goes to screens, so be it.

The overarching message here isn't just about screen time per se. It's about the void, the paucity of steady family connectedness, that too many parents permit to exist--the void that TV programmers, software writers and purveyors of video games are only too happy to fill. "To help our children grow, we entrust them to TV shows and computer applications and video games tailored for them," Rosenfeld says. "When what our children really need is us."

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