I’ve been writing an article for Growing Up in Santa Cruz about children and media, and it’s made me think a lot about our family and how we’ve chosen to deal with a difficult issue.
When my son was very small, something happened that I remember clearly the way that I remember only certain events. I can feel myself sitting in the nursing chair (long since donated to Goodwill), him nursing, my cat Widget (long since passed away) on my lap. My husband and I were watching Thursday night TV, which at that time was Seinfeld, Friends, and ER.
I want to stress how important those shows were to us culturally. For my husband, a show about Jewish New Yorkers was like Northern Exposure was for me. OK, I grew up in Michigan, not Alaska, but most of his childhood was spent in New Jersey. So there.
Anyway, Seinfeld seemed to hit so many key issues in our lives. When we were dating, I was living in San Francisco and he was in Santa Cruz. One night I was sitting on my futon with Widget on my lap, watching Seinfeld. It was the first episode in which the fictionalized character of J. Peterman appeared. Seconds after J. Peterman appeared on the screen, my phone rang. I picked it up and yelled into the receiver, “J. Peterman!!!!!” I knew who it was and why he was calling. That’s how well Seinfeld “got” us.
So back to our son, the baby, nursing while we watched Thursday night TV. He was hardly old enough to notice anything outside of my breasts and what was coming out of his rear end, yet something about the show interested him. He kept popping off and turning his head to see what was on the screen. My husband and I were dismayed. Our son was one of those hyper-sensitive kids from early on. (See The Highly Sensitive Child for details.) Getting him to nurse took five days. Getting him to sleep took three years! Getting him to stop crying between the ages of six weeks and six months was an exercise in parental brilliance.
We realized that the TV was highly attractive to him, and because of the people we were, we wanted to know more. In the very short time that my son was napping, I would pop off articles I found on the web to my husband, and in short order, we decided to cut TV from our lives.
This decision didn’t come out of nowhere. I actually only had one condition when we moved in together: that we wouldn’t get cable TV. I’d noticed how when I went to his house, the TV was always on, matter what the quality of the show. I knew I needed some amount of silence in my life. And I knew we were moving into a house framed by ancient redwoods. In other words, very bad TV reception.
But I did like to watch some TV, and giving it up was a decision we made with serious consideration.
And I admit, we didn’t give it up entirely. For my son’s entire preschool years, and for most of my daughter’s, we did succeed in allowing them virtually no screen time. Our son’s first introduction to the screen was the big screen, and then he went to see a documentary film with my husband.
We have since allowed videos, and our children’s responses have been very different. Our son still requests to watch videos only very occasionally, and usually they are either Harry Potter or Star Wars (the original three). Our daughter would be a total video head if we allowed her. But still, we do limit her watching and mostly she watches and rewatches Magic School Bus. Over. And. Over. And. Over. The most she watches per day is a half an hour. And we do allow them both to DO activities on the computer. (I stress do because they don’t just watch — they program and create.)
But we have completely succeeded as far as broadcast TV goes: Since our children were born, they have watched only one broadcast show, and it was a PBS science show. But it was so hard for our daughter to understand that we couldn’t rewind so she needed to stop talking, so it wasn’t the easiest experience. We’re back to tapes and DVDs.
I’m really glad that we made that choice early on, and I feel for parents who didn’t and want to change things now. Watching TV is a habit and a lifestyle choice. Most of the parents I know who want to limit their kids’ watching can’t because their spouse watches so much it’s not really possible.
In case you’re interested in the case for not watching TV, you can pick up my article in February. Also, take a look at these websites and search for children and media:
Happy New Year!
