The surgeon general’s office is recommending that families turn off their television sets this week and find healthier forms of recreation.

For Surgeon General David Satcher, physical health is the issue. He wants children to get off the couch and go outside.

"This is the most overweight, obese generation of children in our history," he said. "The message this week is about saving lives."

For others who advocate a reduction of television’s role in the lives of Americans, the message is more about mental health and intellectual development. Children whose primary recreation is watching television do not develop ways of entertaining themselves. They sit passively before an electronic device that beams pictures and words — some of them useful and some of them violent or explicitly sexual, not because they’ve chosen to view such content but just because it’s there — into their heads. Sometimes they process the information; sometimes they fail to grasp it as it slips by, but they have no way to review it or expand upon it.

Television is not the only culprit, of course. Children are now sitting in front of computer monitors in record numbers, and although that pursuit is more interactive, it, too, has its pitfalls. The reliability of information available on the Internet is uneven at best, and web-surfers have easy access to material that’s inappropriate for children (as well as some material that any decent human being would find inappropriate).

Are we turning out a generation of out-of-shape youngsters who interact better with high-tech equipment than with other children? We hardly think the situation is that bad, but it’s true that some sociological changes are obvious. Spending time in an Internet chat room is not quite the same as participating in a pickup baseball game. Talking with a stranger halfway across the country doesn’t require the same level of honesty that talking face-to-face with a friend does. Watching a television show doesn’t exercise the same intellectual muscles that reading a book does, nor does television offer the same range of healthy choices as a library.

All that aside, though, the problem isn’t so much the existence of the technology as our reliance on it, and it’s not limited to children. Too many adults flop on the sofa after dinner, and their only exercise between then and bedtime is pushing buttons on the remote control. That’s a poor example; it’s also probably the norm in many homes.

An even worse parental choice is to allow unsupervised television viewing and Internet access. Worthwhile programs do exist — the Discovery Channel and the History Channel, for example. The Internet is a valuable research tool. By teaching children to be wise consumers of entertainment and information, and to balance their viewing time with physical activity, we can teach them to be masters of technology rather than allowing themselves to be enslaved by it.