Okay, I realize I just challenged you yesterday to join me in not complaining for 30 days, but I have a feeling that's going to be a tough pill to swallow. I want to pose another challenge.
A shorter challenger.
Possibly a harder challenge.
A "no electronic babysitter at the beginning of summer break" challenge.
I read a statistic recently that kids ages 2-5 spend an average of 32 hours a week in front of a screen. TV, computers, video games, movies. That beats the 6-11 year olds who average 28 hours a week in front of a screen.
That's 4-5 hours per DAY people.
Some of you may remember last year when I took the "TV Turnoff Week" challenge. I didn't think I could make it for a whole week, so I challenged myself to one day. It wasn't so bad; I explained what was going on to the kids at breakfast and they didn't ask for tv all day long. So I tried it another day. Then another. It didn't take long for me to see the huge attitude shift in my kids; specifically Ryan.
My kids had a new-found creativity. They played together. All. The. Time. They dressed up, played hide and seek, put on puppet shows, colored, made crafts.jpg)
, read books, played random games like two person duck-duck-goose, the list goes on and on.
Without defaulting to media, my kids learned to love playing together again. I stopped hearing, "I'm bored." It was awesome.
Over the last year, I have let them watch tv on occasion. Usually on Saturday mornings as a treat or as a reward for doing something great. But the tv is on less than 2-3 hours a week while the kids are awake. I LOVE it.
When I read that statistic above, it caused me to want to challenge each of you to turn off the tv in your house for a week. Or a day, even. SOMEthing to get your started.
Challenge yourself as a parent to get creative. Challenge your kids to find new things they enjoy. Send them outside to play, to be active, to be kids.
Is anyone on board with me here? (I'm hearing crickets...)
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
"No Media" Challenge
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7 comments:
4-5 hours a day for such small kids is terrible!! Don't want to know what they see!
I think special programmes or animal channels are OK from time to time, but BEST is playing!!
I am so on board with you. Just today I was strategizing how to get my kids watching less tv this summer. We start our summer vacation in less than 2 weeks and its so easy to just default to the tv, obviously. So this summer we're limiting tv & movies & computer to 1 hr a day, which is more than none, but sometimes we just need that veg time in the morning before we're all up and running. Most of the summer we're at the inlaws or camping and neither of those places have the tv option, so I'm sure we'll end up with at least one week of no tv by the end of summer! lol
I do allow the kids to watch a cartoon while I make dinner in the evening (and I'm totally okay with that...I think 20-30 minutes a day is fine).
But I'm also the kind of mom that is gung-ho about keeping summer educational. Our spare time this summer will be spent with lots of library books, family game nights, cultural events around town, science experiments in the kitchen, etc. So luckily, we don't have much time left for TV. Now that Lost is over, I only watch about 30 minutes per week myself. Fine by me!
Sounds good to me. I've been wanting to get rid of ours for years but my husband won't hear of it. He loves to watch the games not a lot but some of them. We did do a no plug week in April and my kids also did so good. They played together they were nice and funny and didn't even care but then on the 5 day said ok can we have it back on now. So I let them. We don't watch too much and they only get the games stuff on every couple weeks. but even the little they do watch bother's me. I'm not into tv either love to read and scrap at night. so count me in.
Katie dear,
I love your blog, even though I'm not a mom, and probably never will be. Your kids are so darned cute!
Anyway, re the TV thing...we haven't had TV for 8 years, and we love it. People think we're weird, but there wasn't anything good on anyway, and when we hear about a good DVD series, we buy it on Amazon, watch it, and resell it if we don't think we'll watch it again.
Also, you'd be surprised at how much more positively you view the world when you're not on a steady diet of doom-n-gloom courtesy of the broadcast media.
I love being media-free, but have had a tough time with it the past year with an active 4-now-5-year old combined with ilness-inducing pregnancy and now a newborn. Poor kid doesn't have anyone else to play with, and pregnant/sleep-deprived mommy and sleeping/pooping baby sister aren't always worthy playmates!
But we're getting back to it. I feel it. In the next few weeks, I can feel the almost-no-more-tv winds of change blowing.
And I can't wait.
I just read this post today and it is funny because my husband just unplugged our tv for the summer. He is a teacher and I home school the kids, so we will all be home this summer and thought it would be a great idea to "unplug" for the summer. This also includes computer time and my husband's iTouch time. We always complain how we never have time to get everything done, so I am curious to see if that changes since the tv has gone away!
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