Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Television and kids

I have to say you all crack me up! ... that said ... I admit to not wanting to be czeched upon and as such decided against collecting checks for my Czech children who too are very much American! lol ... dual citizenship rocks!

... now back to the original TV programming ...

My kids watch too much... But although it goes in phases there are prolonged periods where all they will watch is horrible histories or Deadly 60 (animal documentaries). My eldest was a David Attenborough fiend as a toddler. Hours and hours and hours of David Attenborough and friends.... Apparently animals are a common special interest of girls with Aspergers... Suddenly the penny drops :-).

It was a lifestyle choice to not own a TV that my husband and I made before we had kids, but it most definitely never resulted in my kids wanting to do flash cards. . The two older children spent most of their time taking whatever toys they had and repurposing them into made up games or worlds. We went to the library two or three times a week and checked out armfuls of books, and they played outside a lot. By the time the youngest was born, there were DVD's and streaming videos online so that he grew up absorbing a lot more time watching videos. But he didn't just sit and watch - he would stop, back up the video and watch parts again and again until it drove me crazy.

I tried to institute a family tradition of all of us watching a movie together once a year on Christmas Eve, but after three years, I gave up. No one actually watched the video but me. The rest of them spent the entire time analyzing lighting techniques, tearing apart fallacies in the plot or discussing historical facts about some building that showed up in the film for a few seconds.

We have Netflix (streaming and disc). So that helps. A lot of neat stuff is available there, should we choose to watch it.

When DS does watch, it's almost always David Attenborough.

OP, you could try getting rid of cable and limiting your kids to more educational DVDs.

That's how we started out with our first. No TV until he was three. Then we let him watch certain things, mostly educational, and that's pretty much all he'd ever want to watch anyway. Then we started using it as a way for him to relax because he gets kind of intense, but when our second was born it was difficult to keep her separate. So now, they both pick one show after school and that's their TV time for the day. On weekends they might watch a bit more.
Movies are impossible because they won't sit for that long, which is probably a good thing.

I'd like to cut back on TV, so I think I'll take advantage of the busy start to the school year and just leave it off during the week. Like you, we go to a museum almost every weekend, so a little TV mixed in with that makes for some needed rest time for the parents.

The shows most watched by both DS7 and DS3 include "The Universe", "How the Universe Works", and "Adventure Time". We have all of the "Adventure Time" episodes on DVR, and "The Universe" on blu ray. They also watch Planet Earth, Blue Planet, and some other things on DVD or blu ray. We also watch movies fairly often at night. This can add up to hours on a particular day, but on some days they watch none even when we're not camping or doing something else away from home.

Funny Adventure Time story. My mom watches DS8 in the summer while DH and I are at work. Somehow at the end of summer, cartoons came up and DS mentioned that I had banned him from watching Adventure Time. This was news to me, and I told him I probably said I didn't particularly like that show, but I didn't ban him from it. Total meltdown from DS about how he could have been watching it all summer...
As for TV, when DS was born, my plan was very limited TV and none for a couple years, at least. Then I got to know my attention-seeking high maintenance kid and around age one started with Blues Clues (with Steve, of course). Since then, TV has fallen in with everything else-- everything in moderation.

Programming for preschoolers on Nick Jr and Disney consists of 20-minute programs commercial-free, and DD7 displayed an ability to pay attention and actively engage with that kind of programming as an infant... so we turned her loose. We found it to be a useful way to expose her to a wider array of vocabulary and ideas, because the conversation in the house would have been mostly about her. We credit it for some of her early language development... her first intelligible word was "Doodlebop."

These days, DD7 would rather be playing with her friends, so while she might not be averaging 1.5+ hours/day lately, I still chose that option because we've never regulated it. Just as before, she's into programming well beyond her age, and these days her favorites are younger teen-oriented comedies like iCarly and Good Luck Charlie. She's also fascinated by How It's Made, and while she doesn't go out of her way for it, if I happen to have Mythbusters on, she'll watch it with me.

DD has nearly always watched with actively-engaged adults, and as a visual learner, it's a great learning tool for her. Yes, that includes when she's watching what would ostensibly be intellectually-devoid content like iCarly. It doesn't come at the expense of reading, either, as she reads in her free time at school every day, and at bedtime.

So yeah... we fell right in line with that research paper without noticing.

Even ds10mos doesn't zone out. We watch mostly on an iPad, and his main communicative technique is to point and say "ahhhht?". I'll let you guys work the rest of that one out. Anyway....

The only way we don't fit with the article is on the repetition thing. DS3yrs is really into Dora right now, and he's on his second trip through the Berenstein Bears. Also, Zoboomafoo, which isn't as repetitive as Dora, but certainly formulaic. He also likes less repetitive stuff, but he does not avoid repetition.

(Dora is great for social skills, though, gotta say)

When DS was about 18 mos, we gave up on keeping him away from TV, and within a few months, he was asking for obscure Japanese train videos on YouTube, well enough that babysitters would have to compair notes later... "did you know there's a train called Mimigo?" "Yeah, it's what he usually means when he asks for "red and white go train" "ohhhhhhhh, yeah, that is a good way to describe it!" Ahhh sweet memories! That was back when the SLP thought he had a language delay, and we just thought he had a strange approach.

I don't think the article said anything about kids relaxing with TV. We do 30 min TV before bed, because it's the only thing we've found that can be accessed regularly that gets him to really simmer down. It's a weird combination of being stimulated, but also focesed. No TV and we're discussing the pros and cons of war in the general case for an hour before he can sleep. Books kinda sorta work, but he isn't tired out by them, he's focused, but he just wants another and another and another... And the questions tend eventually to turn towards... Well, right now it's mostly war. And then we're back where we started.

We were very strict with Tv and ds (our oldest) . We only had a Tv in our bedroom and the basement until ds was 3. We would let him watch a few pbs shows (Sesame Street, Super Why, WordWorld) while I worked from home. Unfortunately, it all fell apart when I was on strict bedrest with my dd...ugh.

As for my dd...she watches more than my ds did - but she really only likes Barney (banging my head repeatedly on a wall), Dora, Sesame, and WordWorld). Now that my ds is in school, he only watches about 30 minutes a day - which is good because it was getting out of hand this summer with 108 degree temps out.
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