ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

We watch TV every day. Mostly it's just when winding down for the night or when taking a break after playing hard outside. A lot of other parents think we're basically the devil though. : D

I dunno, I'm frequently astonished at how successfully the best telly or e.g. Pixar captures kids' attention completely. I can't believe it's bad if they're getting that much out of it. Plus they learn loads from something like octonauts. But it's not like we let them watch twelve hours a day anyway, I doubt these scare studies are aimed at us.

We let K watch approximately 20-30 minutes of Baby Einstein videos on the computer every day -- usually in the morning when one of us is gone and the other one needs to shower, or sometimes in the evening if one of us is doing cooking that requires attention and the other isn't home. Yes, we're using it as a babysitter, no doubt, and it's an invaluable one. The Baby Einstein videos, for all the knocking they've taken, are very slow and calm don't have the kinds of fast cuts/edits that one would imagine messing with a baby's attention span. And she's actually learned a lot of words from them.

I don't even watch TV every day myself, but my hope is just to raise K with a healthy, moderated attitude about it and other forms of entertainment, rather than treating it like some kind of demon.

Yeah that's what I was thinking. I've also had to scale back watching movies with violence, blood or lots of profanity, basically horror movies. We wait until she falls asleep to watch adult movies, which a lot of time, means we wait and wait and all of us end up falling asleep.

Just when I think Beeps is melting her mind with too much television, she'll do something like pause the show she's watching, run to the dining room table, draw a complete recreation of what's paused on the screen in full-color, push play again and continue watching the program.

That's awesome!

K also interacts pretty heavily with her videos and talks to me about them while she's watching

The one thing that creeps me out though is that she gets REALLY angry if I turn a video off before it's over

And ohmygod, that's when my 20th Century upbringing comes into play. "BACk in MY day, you couldn't PAUSE the program. You couldn't watch it ANY TIME YOU WANTED TO. No, if you weren't in front of the TV at 7 pm Friday nights, you MISSED the Dukes of Hazzard. Why, I was practically into puberty when we finally got a PAUSE BUTTON."

we mainly let evie watch tv on the weekends, most often to allow us to get more rest when she wakes up early. usually just an episode or two of something. these days she's really into super why, which is good bc it's fairly educational. we've been talking about having a family movie night soon but haven't thought of a good kids movie that doesn't have scary/traumatic stuff in it. we watched pee wee's big adventure a few weeks ago but fast-forwarded over chunks of it (large marge, etc.).

we let s watch a little TV, maybe 3-4 shows a week or something. it doesn't seem like a big deal, though yeah, she was sort of obsessed with it for a little while in the beginning. now she doesn't seem to think about it too much. and yeah, hurting 2, for a little while, she would get extremely emotional if we turned it off. but that's passed too.

i'm not opposed to tv but i feel like i get so little time with her on weekdays that i don't usually want to spend 30 minutes of it with her staring catatonically at the tv.

I tell ya, there's nothing like a 3-year-old pointing out to you possible combos you've missed in a Candy Crush screen.

I don't watch TV at all when my kids are awake. I'll let them watch a few episodes of kiddie stuff sometimes in the afternoons. The lil' one (2 y.o.) loses interest after about 20 mins; the 4 y.o. could watch all day.

The one thing that creeps me out though is that she gets REALLY angry if I turn a video off before it's over

The 4 y.o. will often get REALLY ANGRY when I turn it off, period. And I'm like, why should I let you watch TV if it leads to this?

One really shitty thing about living in 2013 is that in the "old days" Sesame Street was either on or it wasn't. It was such an EASY OUT. "Sorry, that's not on, now! It's over!" But now EVERYTHING is available WHENEVER YOU WANT so it puts everything back on you as the parent.

(I do watch with them sometimes, which I think is loads better than just parking them there while I get on with other stuff cause it leads to interactions and questions and just more general engagement)

The times when Netflix isn't working, we hear

"Turn on Netflix!"
"It's not on. What about 'real' TV?"
"Can we watch Magic Schoolbus?"
"Well, I don't know if it's on On Demand or not."
"Turn Netflix back on!"

i watch sports sometimes while evie's awake bc she will usually just ignore it but that's about it

this whole daycare thing ($110 a week, but that's for just 2 days out of the 5) wouldn't be hitting me with the same level of stress if i wasnt already trying to figure out how to magically pull $5500 out of mid air to pay for childbirth at the moment.

yea we just don't watch enough TV at all for this to be an issue right now. also J is still so little and so restless, crawling and cruising and climbing everywhere, that i don't think he'd even care about it enough to sit down and watch it. we're aware that it may be a helpful thing when he's older and we have a second child - like, who's gonna watch J while a new baby is being nursed or napped and one of us is the only adult home?

on the other hand so much kids TV is absolute garbage that contributes utterly nothing of worth to them, and i think commercials during kids shows are basically fucking evil. i see one of my nephews watching so much TV, literally i'd guess 8 hours a day, during meals, car trips, hanging around the house, all the fucking time, and it's so depressing. even the pixar stuff just gets obnoxious when he's watching cars 2 for the 3rd time that day.

thats with what most would consider pretty good insurance fyi. fuck this country. xpost

xp yeah we find we have to kind of stick to rules and specific times/places with video, since she can otherwise hypothetically watch whatever, whenever. E.g. we decided against ever having video during a meal, or really at any time other than the morning routine or cooking, and as a result, she almost never asks for it during any other time. That may change as she gets older.

the studies around tv watching are definite scary, but i could understand how they could seem abstract if you're taking a really moderate, controlled approach to tv and other media.

on the other hand, though, do you guys notice any immediate behavioral effects from TV watching? a lot of you have mentioned anger when it's turned off. my wife's siblings mentioned a huge increase in brattiness when they let their kids watch saturday morning cartoons compared to when they skip them.

we have sports on the tv a lot of the time, and the kids watch as much of that as they want (which isn't THAT much it turns out). they love the ads.

lately if i'm watching baseball or football, evie will start whining "i wanna watch a commercial" until they go to commercial

i mean yeah she complains if we turn off the tv without warning, but she would also complain if she were painting and i just suddenly took all the paints away. part of it is kids don't like to be interrupted and want to feel like they have some control.

ha my post about commercials was actually an xpost with euler

usually as long as we make the boundaries clear ('we're only going to watch one episode, then we're turning it off'), she's not too grouchy about it.

yeah setting a routine seems to be the most helpful. we let Veronica watch an hour or so in the mornings on Saturday/Sunday (lately it's been all Octonauts), or sometimes we'll rent something specifically for her to watch instead. but no TV during the week. if something happens and the routine gets messed up she can get sort of pissy about it, but it's not a big deal.

I can't wait to watch Star Trek with my kid. Then maybe the shield.

I've still never seen a Lord of the Rings movie. At this point, I'll wait until Beeps is 11 or something and we can watch it together, laugh at the awful CGI.

lol Jeff

I mean I know how cranky I feel when I watch TV or play video games for too long -- something about the combination of stimulation and inactivity. So I can see it having that effect on toddlers.

yea that's true, same here

If $850 is the cheap end, how do low income families cope?? I don't know what prices are like where we live but $850 would mean I'd def have to quit work.

This is what happened when my Mom had twins.. she stopped working. No way she could afford two babies in daycare (& she was a single mother fairly soon after the birth..)

I just heard a feminist author on NPR talking about how it was more common for women to drop out of the workforce after the second child rather than the first (might have just been anecdotal, not sure), and it kind of makes sense why when you think about childcare costs.

this whole daycare thing ($110 a week, but that's for just 2 days out of the 5) wouldn't be hitting me with the same level of stress if i wasnt already trying to figure out how to magically pull $5500 out of mid air to pay for childbirth at the moment.

holy shit, I knew you guys had to pay out the nose but that is insanity. I'm so sorry :( xp

we've watched some OST w Veronica, she digs it. she also watched Star Wars, but has apparently forgotten a huge portion of it and hasn't expressed interest in the other films.

so, in your face George Lucas

one of the most fucked up things about it is that no one tells you beforehand, as with any medical care. Medical costs/billings are a crazy part of our crazy system. A few months ago my whole family wound up in the ER with what turned out to just be really bad stomach flu. All that happened was we spent a few hours in the ER and H and I got IV's (K did not). We got a total of six different bills for six different confusing sets of services that officially cost a total of like $9,000 -- we only had to pay our "co-pays" via insurance which was a fraction of that but still an absurd amount of money for what we actually got.

And it's not like anyone said to us "The tests will cost x, the IV will cost y" -- they just bring you in and charge you later.

yeah i made a lot of attempt to get any straight answer out of our insurance provider ahead of time, and you can guess how well that went. also, having the baby born with his own personal deductible is a nice way to amp up the blindsiding.

lol ouch

Jesus. I guess this partially explains the rise of midwives and home births.. and makes me feel even sadder about abortion restrictions :(

We're in the process of talking with the insurance company to try to get an idea of what our out of pocket costs are going to be. What worries me is the medical necessity review that happens after you've already received the services wherein the insurance company looks at anything that isn't 100% by the book and determines whether it was medically necessary and thus whether they will pay for it. Precertification is no guarantee of payment, either. Bah.

Stupid country.

Carl if I could, I'd totally sham-marriage you for the rest of your pregnancy. :(

<3

I would like my child to be born with a Canadian citizenship option!

my eldest (2yo) basically demands non-stop attention + interaction and will only settle down w/ the tv so we probably indulge her more than she should - especially since her sister was born. she was really into adventure time for a while (my mother thinks it's perverse that i let her watch it but i figured a-it was better than dora, b-children's stories have traditionally dealt w/ sometimes dark + adult content, c-anything really grown-up i figured would go over her head, d-i enjoyed watching it with her) - we even got her a b-mo t-shirt which she loves. but now she's into dora, which is the worst. i asked her if she'd rather watch dora or adventure time and she said dora sadly. however my wife was watching st:tng while nursing + 2yo caught some of that and now that's her favorite show; i asked her if she'd rather watch dora or star trek and she said star trek. i put on dora tho. :/

dora is an abomination

our 2 yr old hasn't gotten attached to dora yet though i know she's seen it at my parents'. the only tv we actively put on for her is: bugs bunny (and other looney tunes) on sat. morning and that's as much for me as for her, and occasionally a disney movie. she has been given gifts of brave, cinderella and tangled. but sesame street classics just showed up on netflix streaming and she really enjoyed that even though she kept asking where elmo was.

yeah I love watching old Disney/Looney Tunes stuff with V