WE COULDN'T help noticing, in the adjacent Forum column by Elizabeth Hamilton today, that she twice recommends to parents interested in improving their children’s reading ability this summer to “turn off the TV.”

Hamilton is a longtime columnist for Variety who writes often about the importance of reading and early childhood education. Her column today got us thinking about the amount of time most of us spend watching television. It’s a lot. In the average American household, the television is on for more than six hours a day.

According to the website kidshealth.org, kids and teens from 8 to 18 spend nearly four hours a day in front of a TV screen. That doesn’t include another two hours daily spent playing video games or surfing the Internet for non-school purposes.

The Kaiser Family Foundation says two-thirds of infants and toddlers watch a screen an average of two hours a day, while kids under the age of 6 continue watching that much TV until they enter school. Then their television watching goes up!

“The first two years of life are considered a critical time for brain development,” says Kidshealth, and “TV and other electronic media can get in the way of exploring, playing and interacting with parents and others, which encourages learning and healthy physical and social development.” The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that kids under 2 years old not watch any TV at all.

On the mainland, public television (okay, TV isn’t all a wasteland) recently aired a special which suggested that all of this electronic exposure for our children is actually altering their brains, in ways we are only beginning to understand. It’s affecting the way they think, or don’t.

A senior citizen with whom we spoke recently sent a congratulatory card and monetary gift to a graduating high school senior, and got back a handwritten thank you note. Only she couldn’t read it. It was actually block-printed, not written, and was nearly illegible. The ability to write what we used to call “cursive” is being lost.

Furthermore, we can’t even count how many letters of application we’ve looked at from kids with newly minted high school diplomas who can’t write a single declarative English sentence correctly. But boy can they text!

It’s sad, and while declining education standards in our schools can’t be blamed entirely on television and electronic devices, they’re a big part of it. Across the country, kids entering college must take remedial classes just to do entry level college work.

So if there are youngsters in your household, do them a favor: Turn off the TV, or at least put limits on the amount of time they can watch, and encourage them to read – a book, this newspaper, anything. It’s a fundamental skill.