One of the solutions Ms. Winn offered in The Plug-in Drug was to remove the television set from the child's bedroom. This surprised me at first. What on earth is a TV doing in a child's bedroom?!! She quotes a survey that says that 53% of children ages 2 to 18 have a television set in their rooms. I'm sure most parents do that because they don't want to watch the same thing as their children are watching. Still, that is a lot of kids who are watching TV unsupervised. Scary.
I have seen a lot of recommendations online for a one-week TV Turnoff. After doing the 30-day Challenge, I would have to recommend that instead. After one week, we were really not seeing many benefits, and the kids were probably at the worst point. If we had not made the committment for a month, I would not have been all that impressed. It would have driven home the point that we watch too much TV, that's for sure. I don't think we would have learned much more than that, and we would not have developed any kind of routine where we didn't automatically think of TV first thing in the morning, or the minute we walked in the door.
Junior is really having difficulty with one show a day. I am not sure how this will work. Because we had errands this morning, I was able to hold him off of watching a show in the morning. When it was time for Peanut's school, I let him watch a short DVD, but tonight after dinner he was just dying to watch another tape. He doesn't get it. I let him help me refill my inkjet cartridge. He liked it, but I'm sure I have a few more gray hairs now. That is probably not a good thing for a 5-year-old to help with. From now on we will stick with cooking and taking out the garbage.
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