Name: Tess
Home: St. Louis
TV Turnoff Week
April 24-30 is TV Turnoff Week. When I read about that, I felt guilty; despite my best intentions of keeping my child TV-free until age 2, Ben is allowed to watch TV. So far, all he watches are various incarnations of Sesame Street (DVDs, the show, just Elmo's World) and Leapfrog Letter Factory, all of which are (at least somewhat) educational and commercial-free. TV has helped him learn letters and their sounds, and thanks to Elmo he now knows what a firefighter is.
I do feel uneasy, however, that TV is so convenient; Ben is so absorbed I can read or do housework while he watches. I try to make sure he gets plenty of active play, and plenty of attention from me. But the Supermother in my head scolds: Shouldn't we be doing art projects? gardening? going to Kindermusik?
When I take Ben to the doctor's office, the pediatrician and staff all assume Ben knows TV characters. The doctor looks in his ears and says, "I see Big Bird!" At the end of the visit, the nurse asks whether he likes Spongebob or Bob the Builder on his stickers. Those comments confused me at first, since I thought the AAP recommendation was no TV until age 2. Evidently, though, that recommendation is to be taken less seriously than, say, the car seat recommendation.
I don't know how to answer Supermother's scolding. My child goes to play groups and parks. I talk and read and sing to him a lot. Will controlled amounts of TV really harm him? So far, he seems to be surviving.....
I do feel uneasy, however, that TV is so convenient; Ben is so absorbed I can read or do housework while he watches. I try to make sure he gets plenty of active play, and plenty of attention from me. But the Supermother in my head scolds: Shouldn't we be doing art projects? gardening? going to Kindermusik?
When I take Ben to the doctor's office, the pediatrician and staff all assume Ben knows TV characters. The doctor looks in his ears and says, "I see Big Bird!" At the end of the visit, the nurse asks whether he likes Spongebob or Bob the Builder on his stickers. Those comments confused me at first, since I thought the AAP recommendation was no TV until age 2. Evidently, though, that recommendation is to be taken less seriously than, say, the car seat recommendation.
I don't know how to answer Supermother's scolding. My child goes to play groups and parks. I talk and read and sing to him a lot. Will controlled amounts of TV really harm him? So far, he seems to be surviving.....
posted by Tess | 11:09 AM
5 Comments:
I'm so glad to get the "heads-up" on this. We usually try to comply with this every year. I've even been impressed with Nick & Noggin who get the word out on this as well. It seems like one of them even went "dark" one day last year in compliance.
I understand your dilemma completly. Before I had kids I thought mothers (& fathers) who let their kids watch tv before age 4 or 5 were just lazy. Believe me, those words were very hard to swallow.
I was somehow able to keep my 1st child tv free until 2 or so. The 2nd? I think she said "SpongeBob" (actually it was "ba-bob") before she said, "mama". She knows every character her big brother does even though she will not entertain the thought of branching out beyond her little world of "Go-ah" (translation: Dora).
It's such a fine line to walk. I think limiting the amount of time their in front of it helps even though that's a challenge too. Around here we call the TV the "brain sucker." We even call it that in front of our kids. I'm sure that confuses them, but they hardly ever see us in front of it. In fact, when we moved into our home, we purposely did NOT put a tv downstairs where we knew people would spend the majoity of time. It's so funny to watch & hear the number of people who are dumfounded by that. "Where's your tv? How do you survive without one downstairs?" I smile & say, "It's ok for us just to talk, right?"
I feel your pain completely. And I never thought about the pede talking about characters. Ours does too! Very interesting. I may have to call her on it at our 2 year appt.
Thanks for making me think!
"their" should have been they're. Sorry, but I HATE it when people get that confused. I wish the comments of blogger had a spell check (although that would not have been caught).
Ok, sorry to keep writing these books on your comments!
I figure my girls are surviving with TV a lot better than I would be surviving without it. Since we have no cable and because we live in the woods with no airwaves reception to speak of, we have to watch TV through the university's online system, hooked up through our set. It's an annoying pain in the butt, but it really, really depresses my interest in flipping on the TV to "see what's on". I only turn it on now when I specifically seek out a program, which has been almost better for me and my previous TV overload than it has been for the girls (which I always limited before - not so good at limiting myself).
But...... we do have a fantastic library with tons of videos and we'll check out 2-3 per week. The nice thing about videoes is that I control when they watch the shows (more as a reward, and we don't determine the course of our day by the show schedules) and we have to go to a library to get them, hence more books too. :)
I think one of the keys to this issue is to be careful about what you do let your kids watch. There is a big difference between leaving the tv on all day long and letting little Johnny catch Jerry Springer - or having planned, selected tv times with educational entertainment of your choice. :)
That said... I used to be one of those moms who did try to avoid tv at all costs. My kids did not watch even handpicked videos until they were about 2. Then it got progressively worse from there.
So let me tell you what I notice. I notice, that one days/weeks when we have watched more tv (tv meaning videos that we picked out) than usual, they appear to be more distracted and act hyper. On weeks when we limit tv severely, they are different little people altogether!
Also, for what it's worth, I've heard that if you're going to let your kids watch tv, let them watch things that will stretch their attention span - things like Sesame Street can be fun, but your kid quickly gets adjusted to little sound bytes of information and it may then be difficult for him to pay attention to a longer storyline later.
Hope this all made sense. :) And now I should probably go read to my kids and turn off the video they're watching while I was catching up on blogging. Hehe.
I've been reading your blog for awhile now and enjoy it, btw. :)
Thanks for the comments, everyone! It's nice to hear from other people who are deliberate about their TV-watching. Sarah, I think you're right about the behavior issues. One thing I've found in general is sometimes when Ben is acting up, my tendency is to want to pull away, either by using TV or by encouraging him to play by himself. When I do the opposite, however, and pay more attention, sometimes the bad behavior magically goes away, and we both feel better.
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