Reply to Let's be honest, how much time does your child spend watching TV per day?

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[quote=Anonymous]We honestly don't do much TV. It's not a holier than thou thing or an absolute, though. It felt important to me with my first to limit the TV when he was really young (worry about attention spans) and by the time I'd relaxed a bit as a parent, we were kind of into a groove where TV just didn't have a huge role to play in our house. We let DS, who is 3 now, watch for a little bit if he asks. He asks about once every 10 days or so, not often at all, and he'll usually only watch for about 20 minutes before finding something else to do.

Of course, that's just TV and doesn't count computer / ipad / phone screentime. We will let him watch some videos occasionally; usually documentaries but occasionally funny animals videos. For instance, we recently traveled to costa rica and saw a ton of nature stuff and when we got home, we got books about the animals and plants, but we also pull up videos to show the kids when they showed interest about things we saw. There are definitely exceptions: I also downloaded some vintage Mr. Rogers a month ago and we spent a rainy afternoon watching the shows together and talking about the characters and how I watched them when I was a little girl, etc.

Obviously, I think some children are probably watching too much TV, and I also think some shows are too much for young kids to handle (both plot and pace) and I think it can be a distraction thing for kids and families in general. But, I think you can go too far in the opposite direction, drawing a line in the sand that says "no TV ever," and then you miss out on some pretty neat things your kids can enjoy. There are some who say "it's unnecessary" but many enjoyable things in life are not strictly necessary, (reading fiction, for instance) either. As long as there is a balance to what the child enjoys, I do think some TV (screen time is what I really mean) can play a valid role. Some children's programming is just totally disposable, not that there's not a place for mindless stuff, but it's not all mindless, either. I genuinely think a show like Mr. Roger's neighborhood, or how Sesame Street used to be, is a valid form of art.

OKay, probably not the reply you were after! Ha ha ha.  But I've actually been giving this some thought lately. A friend of mine is sending her child to a waldorf preK and they asked her to promise not to allow screen time, and we had a similar conversation over coffee a few weeks ago.

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