children and TV

Perhaps it is because I am not a father..yet..but I am seeing signs these days that parents rely too much on the use of television for family time together as well as to use them as babysitting devices. My brother commented once that Barney was a life saver many many a time because he could just put the kids in front of a one hour video, hit rewind every hour and have the entire morning or afternoon to himself to do things. I like to dream that when my wife and I eventually have kids, we are able to stick to our little dreams of fantasy where there is enough time for both parents to go grocery shopping on the weekend so that the kids cant hold us hostage in the grocery store with their tantrums, that we will want to spend more time with our children and not just plop them in front of the TV and let their minds go to waste instead of balancing a light level of educational TV with imagination and skill developing board/card games (like poker or blackjack..improve their statistical counting ability as well as begin them on math adding at a young age).

Wish I could find the two commercials that Shaw is showing these days to promote their new "movies/shows on demand" feature here in Canada. One commercial shows a house that has been totally messed up and full of girls toys (dinosaurs in a pair of ladies high heels, tea party sets all over the place, barbies and other dolls scattered around). Finally it shows a couch with three girls (probably aged 3-5) bouncing around on the couch with a grown man saying "here..how about this?" and he puts on a cartoon and the girls instantly settled down, laugh and watch the show. A lady comes in and says "how was your day?" and the man replies "easy..piece of cake..little angels they are".

The other commercial has a mother and father sitting on one love seat with a young boy and girl (aged 13-15) sitting together on the other love seat. The young boy compliments the mother on her great idea to watch an after dinner movie and then compliments the dad on his excellent socks. The movie then gets a little romantic and the boy puts his arm around the young girl and she smiles sheepishly. The dad sees this and goes "how about a nice documentary?" and switches to penquins walking through the ice and snow fields. The boy retracts his arm from the girls shoulder, his amorous advances obviously shot down by the protective father.

So with these ads, is Shaw trying to tell us "if you dont want to be worn out at the end of the day, then get this service and keep the kids busy with TV" or "instead of talking, playing board games, getting to know the love interest of your daughter/son, why not throw in a movie and bore the poor girl/lad to tears". TV, the novocaine for the next generation.

One survey on www.CTV.ca even asked:

Are parents letting their toddlers watch too much TV?
Yes 5397 votes (89 %)
No 640 votes (11 %)

Total Votes: 6037

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/HTMLTemplate?&tf=ctv/generic/hubs/ctvNewsSub.html&cf=ctv/generic/hubs/ctvNews.cfg&id=57656&pollid=57656&save=_save&show_vote_always=no&poll=CTVNewsTopStories&hub=TopStories&subhub=VoteResult

Now, I wonder, if those 5,397 people that voted that toddlers are being allowed to watch too much TV, are single people, or newly weds without children (like me), that have not had to deal with children and their exhuasting ways yet. Kind of like a person saying "yes kids are eating too much fast food and parents need to cook better meals" but not having kids of their own, they have no idea how hard it is to bring the kid home from school, give them a good meal and then shuttle them out to their after school event like soccer, ballet and baseball.

All I know is that I am going to try my hardest to make sure that the children in our household get more time playing actual games like tag, hide and go seek, board games, card games and interactive human games instead of video games and movies.