After reading countless stories and blogs about how television is rotting the brains of our young children, and subsequently feeling guilty about how the TV is a fixture in the lives of my two kids, I’m glad to have stumbled across a column by a dad who argues that a little TV isn’t such a bad thing for our tots.
In a recent story posted at Slate.com with the headline “Go Ahead, a Little TV Won’t Hurt Him,” technology columnist Farhad Manjoo writes about how he doles out small daily doses of TV to his 1-year-old son in order to make everyone’s lives a little bit easier. Click through to read his piece and you will likely find yourself nodding in agreement with his assertion that “too much TV is bad for your child—but some TV, and some time with other screens [like iPads, iPhones and computers], is nothing to worry about.”
Manjoo’s research seems to back up his – and my – personal experience with the benefits of issuing bites of screen time to children. He “found that there’s little to support a zero-tolerance policy on screen time” but there seems to be plenty of anecdotal evidence to say that TV can be a greater mother’s little helper to grease the wheels of the daily parenting routine.
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Manjoo writes that his son is a picky eater, but if he is fed while watching TV, the food goes down with less fuss. He talks about how when his son was much younger, they would snuggle on the couch together and drift off to sleep while the TV was on in the background, even though the American Academy of Pediatrics warns that no children under the age of 2 should watch TV under any circumstances because it could lead to developmental problems. And he writes about how it doesn’t seem like such a bad thing to let his son play with his iPad if it’s done in the name of buying time to take a shower.
All of that sounds reasonable to me. In our house, dinner would never get on the table if my children didn’t watch a half-hour of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse while I cooked. And nothing gets my daughter out of bed in the morning as quickly as when I whisper in her ear that I’ve got Super Why tuned in on the tiny TV in our bedroom. In this case, as it is with so many decisions facing parents today, absolutes seem unnecessary when moderation is the simplest answer.
