🚀 go-pugleaf

I am afraid I am going to be a dissentor on this topic or at least give a
different experience.

My children are in their late teens and early twenties.  Two are in
university, one of those in first year law. Both at University of Toronto.
My youngest is in her last year of high school, and a known social and
political activist at age 17.  I give as my credentials for speaking that
all three are high-achieveing happy kids with many and varied interests and
impressive lists of personal achievements.  All read and write well. All
play musical instruments.  All still talk to me about life problems and
decisions.

So I take a deep breath and say.....I never limited their TV viewing in any
way or indeed censored much of anything they took in. It didn't seem to be
my business to do so, as long as they were making pretty good choices.  They
did.  I suppose if I had seen a problem, I would have but I didn't see any
point in creating one by making TV a "forbidden fruit".  Faced with a choice
between TV and stories read by mom or other fun activities, TV usually was
not a choice.  I did try to watch TV with my children and stay close at hand
to engage them in conversation or suggest follow-up activities.  Now and
again one or the other would seem to be watching too much but before I
intervened, a new interest, club, hobby, group of friends would end it.
Just a phase.

I don't accept that "the Medium is the Message".  Books are not inherently
better than television.  I would much rather see my children watching the
"Civilization" series on TV than reading books that contain pornography or
incite racial hatred.  Mein Kampf was a book not a TV show.  Good television
can be an important part of family time and provide some common fodder for
discussion and follow-up reading.  It can expose a child to an interest or
hobby or consolidate school learning.  Our middle son came to realize that
History was his lifelong passion during the "Civil War" series on PBS.

Good parenting is not as simple as hard and fast rules like "No TV".  It is
an ongoing hard job.  When you are doing the job right, kids will have
better things to do than veg out in front of the TV.  And it will be their
positive choice, not a "rule" that they resent.  I saw part of that in an
incident recently.  My daughter was working on a project with 2 friends.
Both came from homes that were rather strict.  They were doing research on
the 'Net.  I became aware that my daughter's friends were looking up
pornography on the Internet. Just when I was going to poke my head in, my
daughter said, "Can we get back to work now?  This is SO boring and SO
infantile!"  They did.  I really think that this maturity and confidence
came from being empowered to make choices, with loving parental support,
encouragement and guidance.

I realize that mine will likely be a minority view but had to say it.

Linda Rogers
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Linda Rogers
Niagara Falls, Ontario
Canada
lrogers@vaxxine.com
family page:  http://www3.sympatico.ca/douglas.rogers/douglas.rogers
GH Social Action Committee:  http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/9378
cello page: http://www.cello.org/freepage/lrogers.htm
BPO Educational Programs:  http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Strasse/5732
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No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses.