I read (not watched) something about national turn off your television week. The question of television for babies and toddlers is an interesting issue, one that I've thought about a lot, and now seemed a perfect time to get your ideas on the topic.
Many of our parenting friends take the anti-television point-of-view, and while I can see the sense in their reasoning, I tend to feel positive about the role of TV in Pearl's life thus far. I think Marcia feels less positive about television. Interestingly (at least to me), she watches TV and I don't. Hmmmmm.
1, Our approach has been to introduce tv almost exclusively through video. Pearl's age group (she's 25 months old) learns through repetition, and the best way to achieve that is by showing videos.
2, We limit the amount of TV to 1 hour a day. Some days she doesn't watch anything on the television.
3, We try to choose age-appropriate material that reinforces the things we're already working on with her.
4. We watch the show with her the first time so that we can help her make connections between the content of the stories and the events of our own world.
5. We've tried to model for Pearl creative ways to integrate books, TV shows, stuffed animals, etc. into her play. Last week we played doctor's office. The doctor was our pediatrician, Doctor Alex, and the patients were Pearl, Carrie, Curious George (he eats a puzzle piece in one book), and Wags the Dog (from the Wiggles). Each patient came into the examination room, one at a time, and was treated. (My favorite one was that Wags Dog ate something unusual that gave him a tummy ache. It turned out to be CAT food!)
That's our strategy. We started out with Baby Einstein and moved on to Sesame Street. Usually at any given time she is especially interested in one show, but she moves on to something different every few weeks.
Using this approach, I do think Pearl has gotten powerful reiteration in the areas of vocabulary, sentence building, and repetition-based learning, such as counting, ABC's, colors, for example.
However, I must also agree that there are a number of the anti-TV arguments that are very compelling. The commercialism of absolutely everything is truly disheartening. The reality that bandaids cost $1 and bandaids with cartoon characters on them cost $2 and that your child may well throw a tantrum in the store in order to help you make the *right* decision. We haven't had tantrums thus far, but I can understand why parents fear their children's response to the compelling power of the media imagery.
Clearly we all know that the TV can not be a substitute for teacher, parent, or caretaker. Feel free to weigh in on this one. Your turn.
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