Anonymous wrote:OP, I hope your son is not an only child. Otherwise, your home sounds incredibly dull. Poor kid.

Oh BS. Get some perspective. I've got three kids and we watch TV but if you think that TV is what makes a home exciting, you are incredibly limited. And "poor kid"? No way. You need to learn the differences between 'wants' and 'needs'. TV is a want, not a need. You should save your pity for the kids who don't have stable homes and nurturing parents.

OP, I hope your son is not an only child. Otherwise, your home sounds incredibly dull. Poor kid.

No tv in our house during the school week either, OP. You should rock on! By the time they get home from school, have snack and do homework (yes, even the 2nd grader has homework), it is almost dinner time, and then after dinner it is bed and bath. I find tv is really disruptive in the evening, particularly for our youngest boy -- it makes it really hard for him to settle down at night. Without TV, the kids are talking and playing with each other, engaging in imaginative play or reading or playing games or running around outside.

On the weekend the kids are allowed to have 1/2 hour each per day of tv (and since they both watch each others' shows, it's more like an hour). They are vegetables in front of the TV. They fight about what to watch. They whine for more even when time is up. When they are done with TV they are cranky not happy and whine "what can we do...."

Once I caught our oldest sneaking TV similar to your description. She got in trouble and had other privileges revoked. When you break a rule, there are consequences. It was a valuable experience for her, and about so much more than TV. I trusted her with a privilege and she abused the trust and privilege ... Now that she's older, we've had the same discussion about the cell phone. I think she knows that I'm not kidding that if she abuses her cell phone privileges, it will be taken away. So far, no problems with the phone.

Boys age 8 and 11. They get <30 minutes in the morning watching cartoons and ~30-45 minutes of TV in the evening watching the news or Discovery type channel show with me. They also get about 1 hr to play video games each day after homework is done.

On weekends, it's about the same but we watch a movie on Friday and maybe Saturday night and about 1 hr extra of sports. Plus another hr of video games.

There has been no impact on school...both in GT and still in the top 25% of their class. Both play on sports teams, chess club, music lessons, reading each day, family dinners, etc. Relax and let them enjoy what they like to do within reason.

op here - surprised to find the thread is still going.

DS watched some sports and cartoon for about one hour total sat/sun, and since there's no school today he got to play 30-min of angry birds.

i'm allowing screen time and expect him to respect the limits. well see.

Anonymous wrote:Nope. None. They could watch it elsewhere. It really wasn't a big ideological thing. I just cannot stand the television. And I have a long standing rule that I don't spend good money to make myself miserable, so we didn't have a tv.

This is us too. We're not against TV at all. We just don't feel like spending the money. We watch things online, and we rent DVDs. I never realized it's such an incredibly big deal not to have a TV.