Babble

Okay, I'm all for making the most of my baby's devlopment. I have all the toys, I read all the books/ magazines/internet posts, and I definitely try to stay up on all the current do's and don'ts of parenting. But absloutely no t.v.? C'mon, really now. I happened to find out (through grandma,) that my 10 month old son, Avery, will sit through the entire video of Disney's Peter Pan. (Only Peter Pan, no other Disney classic will do.) Now, before you all start gasping and thinking I'm a bad parent because I let my kid watch a movie, It's pretty rare that I get desperate enough to pop the movie in. But trust me, there have been a few days where I wouldn't know how to survive without Wendy, Tinkerbell and all of the Lost Boys. How do you think all of my Christmas Wrapping got dne? So, go ahead, start firing arrows. I'll be sure to stay inside with Avery, watching Peter Pan.     

I don't think we should us the TV to stimulate our kids, but at the same time, the damn thing is pretty distracting too eh.

I think you're all good. My pop culture brain stems right back to the Electric Company, Muppet Show and Sesame Street. Not to mention Mr. Dress Up for any Canadians in the house.

I think we should try to avoid having the TV on all day. Try throwing on some Ramones instead.

Merry Ho Ho.
Dave

 

Speaking of the Ramones, have you heard of he Rockabye Baby CD's? They're instrumental renditions of classic rock bands. They have a ton out there, so far we only have the Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Metallica CD's. The Pink Floyd is my favorite.

Happily, we live in an age where we can control what is on the TV, and there are plenty of good things to choose from.  If I have the TV on during the day (it's rare), we are watching VH1 Classic or SpongeBob.  I love the Teletubbies, too, but that's mostly because I spent my drug-addled twenties watching them as a hangover cure. 

Anyway, I do try to keep the TV off because it's colorful and lights up and makes noise and Jillian is totally attracted to things like that.  I'm thinking I could stick my U2 DVDs in, maybe, and that would be both fun for me and educational for her.  After all, I was raised on a steady diet of MTV, back in the good old days when they actually showed videos and I turned out mostly okay.

 Mostly.

Funny you should mention that. Yeah, I just heard it two days ago. Then we had a couple of friends over last night. I was telling them about it, and showing them the site, when they produced a gift wrapped CD for me. I opened it, and it was the Rockabye Baby Led Zeppelin one (hilarious too!).

It's really awesome. Thanks.

D
 

Are kids aren't allowed to watch Teletubbies. They freak us out.

Happy ho ho.
D

we only have one tv in our house and it is in our bedroom where we like to watch tv before we go to bed. we've been hoping for a couple of years now to make enough $ to buy a plasma for our den because in that way football on sundays and monday nights would be the fuck out of our room but alas, we're not there yet. the den however has become the perfect play room for our baby 8 month old baby. we have gates at either entrance and have the space baby proofed. so she has a big space to roam in and really has developed a long attention span for playing over the past few months. we can easily either be with her in the room or in the kitchen or living room and she just keeps playing and play with her tupperware, balls, links...all no battery stuff. it keeps her really active and tires her out faster. so really the idea of tv hasn't even come up for us yet. (in our bedroom it is so high up she'd never be able to see it without being precariously perched on a ladder). she knows we're in the next room and i can sing to her if i'm out of sight for too long so she knows i'm there...but otherwise she's just happy to keep banging her moo moo the cow soft book against the floor and peeling up the sides to the squares of letters that make up the soft mat.

As with most anything, moderation is the key.  DVDs allow us to control the extent and content of our kids' viewing, and shelter them from food and product advertisements.  The only TV we let them watch is an hour or so of the Disney Channel on lazy weekend mornings.  Little Einsteins incorporates classical music and art into the stories, exposing them to a lot of stuff I didn't learn about until much later.  After one episode, our four-year-old specifically requested Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which we now keep in the car.

As far as music goes, I'd rather expose them to original works than dumbed-down versions of rock and roll.  My kids' favorites (also among my own) are the soundtrack to O Brother!  Where Art Thou? and Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.  Hearing them sing along to "Big Rock Candy Mountain" cracks me up. 

 

I second that on the actual versions of things.   Those Kidz Bop CDs make me want to puke.  My kid will just have to suffer with listening to the Beatles and Bob Dylan and all the stuff I hated when I was a tiny kid but appreciate so much now.

I vowed not to have any TV before age 2, but around 14 months the kid started to wake up in the morning crying and inconsolable.  We tried Sesame St in the am and it calmed her down and let us feed her bfast.  Now she expects Blues Clues first thing every morning, which is fine by me as I can't really function until I've had coffee.  But I don't allow it during the rest of the day (although, I have to admit that lately--she's now 18 months--when I'm trying to make dinner and she wraps her body around my legs and grabs stuff in the fridge every *single* time I open it, I've dabbled in putting on Blues Clues while I make dinner.  But it gets turned off for eating.

We also swore that there would be no TV. In fact, I upset my mother more than once by telling her to turn off the TV while she was visiting and my son was in the room. However, since I work from home and sometimes need a little distraction for my son so that I can meet a deadline, I have (and I'm ashamed to admit this...) popped in DVD or two to keep him occupied. I started doing this when he was a little over a year old. He's now over 2 and has been to the movies a handful of times and absolutely loves going. He watches a bit of TV (DVDs usually because we don't have cable and he can't always find something he wants to watch on PBS) daily.

The rockabye baby cd's are different! I'm  only saying this because I  absolutely hate kids music, and you can guarantee that my kid will listen to and fall in love with the same music that I do. But, the rockabye baby cd's are just so...cool. i wish I would have thought of this concept. It's the same exact melody, except they replace the guitar for the glockenspiel. It's good chill-out relaxing time music. I even listen to them, I love it.

Well Ive heard its bad for kids under two - but whoever wrote that must be a a sane mum with a bucketload of imagination. I was bought up with no tv till I was 18 - as soon as I left home I watched tv straight for about 4 years. Even watched the news when there was nothing else on (heh heh).

i concur with the majority here, and i would take it a step further and say that i think moderate amounts of tv is a good thing for our little 22 month old trouble maker. Though i resent the baby einstein people slightly for making enormous amounts of money by videotaping images of spinning tops and such and passing it off as a scientifically endorsed educational system (why didn't i think of that), i do think our guy learns stuff from the videos. His favorite is "things that go" followed closely by "meet the orchestra" ... yesterday he blurted out with great enthusiasm "basoon!" and he can identify most of the instruments in the wind and string sections. he got a "saxa-flute" for xmas, a toy bent recorder you can assemble, and he thinks the name is hysterical, perhaps because he was acquainted with flutes and saxaphones. we will sometimes have a video in in his room and he will go from playing to repeating new words on the video -- it's selective stimulation he choses to ignore or engage with. we also have a portable dvd player we take on plane trips -- i have no idea how we would survive them without it. we do make an effort to restrict the number of viewings per day, but in moderation it clearly improves our lives and may be a net positive for him.

I too have read these studies, but none of them ever go beyond the research and suggest why TV is bad for kids.  And what kind?  Is it refracted light in the McLuhan sense, or is it the content? I have an xbox, and I'll be darned if our 8 month old doesn't luv-luv-luv watching the music visualizations. When she wouldn't fall asleep early on, she would watching the xbox visuals. 

 I'd be interested to hear Steven Johnson's thoughts on this. Did he let his pre-two year olds watch tv?