Dear readers, I will level with
you. We watch TV. Media is a part of our world. I use TV to unwind and to
connect with friends, family and my sweet hubby. In parenting I use it to get a
few moments all to myself during the day without interruption. I am by no means
an expert in the department of choosing weather to have my kid watch TV or not.
I am striving to reach more of a happy medium with it in my life. I imagine a
utopic place where my kid has a gaggle of pals always around to keep her
company and I have a gaggle of friends to connect with, village style, so TV
would be completely irrelevant. I would love to have this village and have
figured it out some in my adult life. However that village is partly long
distance and not always around. The habit of TV is still prevalent. I
watched TV as a kid, a lot of which was un-monitored. Sometimes it was happy
memories, of fun puppets and story lines. Sometimes it was very violent and
scary, lots of it I did not understand and had the images stay with me, disturbing
me as a sensitive young one, sending me into haunted, unsafe feelings that were
hard to digest.
When Sweetpea was little I worried
about TV, a lot more then her daddy did. TV was monitored in his household,
with lots of rules about what he could watch and when. This made his rebellion
even stronger. His attitude became, "I get to watch what I want when I
want." I have read all the theories out there about kids having
too much media. The harmful affects of low attention spans, expecting to be
entertained all the time, also the way media affects our developing human
brains. I did not want that for my kid. Then we had her and life continued on.
I started noticing how I got a much needed break when my little one was
transfixed on a show, how I could carve out that very important me time when
she was completely engaged in something else.
I felt like we kept it in check.
She never watched a lot and mostly TV that I deemed age appropriate and worth
watching, not just any children's programming. Still it did not always sit well
with me. I watched her get completely absorbed in something, the whole mouth
open, staring that I had always looked down upon in some of the kids I watched
as a nanny. Now here it was, my kid, looking like a fish glued to a screen.
There are many things I have had to let go of in terms of the "ideal
world" and my parenting, this one was hard to swallow but felt like an
essential way for me to stay being myself and be a happy parent.
As Sweetpea has gotten older her
engagement with media has changed. She never wants to sit through a whole
movie, if I let her go for as long as she wants in front of the TV she gets up
all done after 3, 20 minute shows. I like seeing her self monitoring, knowing
when she is done. We have hit some kind of balance, Daddy had faith that if we
exposed her to media she would not want to engage with it all the time, that it
would just be another thing going on and she could make good self decisions on
weather or not to be a part of it. For the most part this has worked.
Then I re-picked up a book I read
and reviewed earlier in this blog, "Heaven on Earth, A Handbook for
Parent's of Young Children." In this book Sharifa Oppenheimer lays out the
Waldorf philosophy of keeping kids media free. She puts it in a way that feels
more accessible to me then the other more critical, judgmental books I have
read on keeping kids media free. She says "You may be thinking, how will I
have a minute to myself without the TV? I would never have survived with
media in our life! I was far too busy to deal with the whining, discontent the
media creates in children. Because I relied entirely on my children's innate
capacity to create, imagine, be active, and entertain them selves, they did
exactly that."
This struck a cord with me. Sweetpea
does have a brilliant imagination. Once we get passed that nagging phase of
desiring the TV, she will just chose something else to do. I have slowly taken
media out of our transition times. When I make dinner I tell her what I am
doing and ask if she wants to help. She typically does a combo of things,
helping a little, singing, getting out all the utensils to play with and
setting the table. At first she would whine if a show was not on, but if I
ignored her complaints long enough, most of the time she choose to self
entertain.
Oppenheimer also talks about a
rhythm way of parenting, where each day has a rhythm and beginning it with
outdoors time. I really liked this theory. I tried testing it out these past
few weeks. Often the morning is a draw for Millie to watch TV. There is a TV in
the kitchen at her g-parents house that is usually on in the morning. We have
come to an understanding that News goes off when she is in the room. But once
the boob tube is on she wants to watch a show. I call this “wake and bake” and
have always disliked how this was the start to our day. I often catch her a
little bit after her daddy and her have already gone to the kitchen. He almost
always obliges to putting a show on for her. I have started to strategize a
different way to handle the mornings with him. When she wants his attention,
try giving her different things to do other then TV.
I also have been pushing
her to just go outside with us. Weather she wants to or not. I ignore the
nagging, "I want to watch a show" complaint and walk outside. Once
outside I start asking her lots of questions like, "what birds do you
hear? What do you think that sound was? Was the bird saying hello, or go away?
What kind of tree is that?" These work enough to get her into her
surroundings and from there I get a good 20 minutes of playtime,
sometimes with me sometimes alone while I sip my coffee and stare at the
clouds.
Our system is not perfect, I still
rely on some screen time to be able to get other things done during the day
without interruption but I feel like we are heading towards a balance. The path
I am always striving for in life.
