I’ve been thinking about TV a lot lately—how much is too much, how much the right amount, and is there such a thing as too little? To explain its role in our life, we watch some PBS kids’ programming, and we also watch videos from the library. These may be great, good or poor when it comes to educational worth, but they are never in any way intense or upsetting or violent. (We never watch the children’s channels like Nickelodeon, just the ads alone are enough to make your hair stand on end.) I don’t bring in much from Disney, which tends to be all of the above. How many different scenarios can they come up with the kill off the remaining parent and leave little whatever (fawn, lion cub, etc.) an orphan? So contentwise we tend to stick to nonfiction, like outer space or undersea creatures, or just the tamest PBS sort of things like Thomas the Tank Engine and Spot.
In our daily life, there are moments when I need a moment. Whether it’s to answer an e-mail, make a phone call, or take a shower; whether it’s to clean up the kitchen and make dinner or fold a load of laundry, sometimes I just can’t give Isaac my undivided attention. Putting on a video is the easiest possible way to get him to sit still and out of my way for a short time, not harming himself or creating more work for me by harming something else in the house in his desire for attention.
Even spelling it out like this makes me feel guilty!
It makes me wish that I lived in an ethnic tribe with a whole lot of other women and children sitting around outside my hut, and that I could hand Isaac off to someone when I needed a little bit of time. If I had a live-in community of aunts and sisters to watch him, that would be better, but I don’t. I suppose then I would just wear him on my back all the time and the gathering-type work I would do would be such that he could help in his own way. But having him help unload the dishwasher is not all that helpful and actually can be a real pain in the ass! And watching him throw folded clothes all over the floor is nothing if not utterly maddening. And having him climb my head, pull my hair, and scream for attention when I’m on the phone trying to make a dentist appointment is embarrassing and maddening at the same time.
Anyway, so I’ve been going along walking the thin edge between guilt for having the TV babysit my child and the bare honest necessity of doing exactly that from time to time. I haven’t been entirely comfortable with this situation but I haven’t had any better ideas either.
So then a couple things happened. One night last week, at this particular awkward moment when I was trying to make dinner and Ben was trying to take out the trash, Isaac went upstairs and picked up the remote. I heard the TV go on to a real grown-up channel, probably CNN. I ran upstairs to find him sitting in his dad’s club chair, watching some people in night vision goggles fighting off the insurgents in Iraq. Isaac said, “I want to see Thomas!” at which point I quickly obliged. We’ve been talking about getting rid of cable for a long time, but I think this was the final straw.
Then we went to our first class at this Waldorf School, where we’re doing a little parent-tot workshop once a week. The Waldorfians simply hate TV and our first assignment was to read an article explaining just exactly why they hate it so much. In sum they hate it because it does everything for the child, providing images and sound and just feeding it all in in this passive way, and so they argue that it stunts the child’s ability to imagine things on his own. And that’s not even scratching the surface on the content itself, just talking about the medium.
Even though I think Isaac is incredibly imaginative (just the other day he said, “I’m imagining how a backhoe moves—that’s what I’m IMAGINING in my MIND.” Emphasis his) this struck a chord with me. I wonder what the Waldorfians (as I choose to dub them) do when they need to make a phone call. Knowing them, they just set the child up with some beeswax and the child sits there happily and quietly making little beeswax animals for the next twenty minutes. I wonder whether Isaac could be trained or retrained? (While I was at the school I was struck by the pervasive QUIET of the place, and then I walked past a room full of maybe 3rd graders, all sitting at their desks in rows, embroidering.) I fear that if I gave him some beeswax (wonderful stuff for modeling) and left the room, he would shortly try to eat it, begin to choke, and I would have to rush in, give him the Heimlich maneuver and call 911. He’s not self-sufficient enough to be left alone with an art project of any kind.
The broader issue is what role society should play in our house. For instance, is depriving him of Disney going to be a problem later, when he’s viewed as clueless by his peers? Or, as in the whole pink shoe situation, should we be shielding him from social morays or helping him to understand them as soon as possible? (I felt a lot better when I read an article by a man who said that his 4-year-old son insisted on wearing a full-length pink velvet gown all the time…) I don’t want him to be a Luddite, but I also don’t want him to have to cope with way too much input too soon.
In the case of Hurricane Katrina, he saw pictures of the flooding in the NY Times. And since then, as recently as this morning, he asks me to tell him about “the flood.” And I walk through the whole situation with him in the most simple, least upsetting terms. I don’t know how he got hold of the idea that someone in an attic had to chop his way out with an axe, but he asks me about that part too.
Somehow society at large just intrudes into our lives. (Or is it an intrusion? Or are we just part of it?) Take smoking. Neither of us smokes, and we don’t know anyone who smokes. I think the only place Isaac has seen smoking must be people out on the street smoking because they aren’t allowed to do it inside. So the other day, Isaac was chewing on a pen. I said, “Don’t chew on that.” And he said, “I’m not chewing it, I’m smoking it.”
Also, when or where has he seen a gun? But he was whipping around these purple mardi gras beads he has, and I told him to stop it, and he said, “That’s just my gun!”
I’ll admit that we frequently drink wine with dinner. But still it concerned me when I noticed our small child swirling and sniffing his apple juice.
And how about the moment, not too long ago, when we were driving along and all the sudden Isaac pipes up from the back seat, “Mommy, what’s cocaine?”
SHRIEK! I thought we had at least ten years before the cocaine talk! I’m not ready! But I resisted the impulse to slam on the brakes get hysterical. I just kept driving and said calmly, “Hm… Why do you ask, honey?” And he said, “They play it in McEligot’s Pool. On the grass by Sneeden’s Hotel.”
HUGE sigh of relief—croquet. Just mispronouncing croquet.
Oh, I don’t know. We can’t live in a plastic bubble. These things are all a part of the world and he does need to live in the world. It doesn’t make sense to isolate him. A friend said that the goal is for the child to “stand tall within the culture.” Maybe that’s what we should shoot for.
But that being said, I just cancelled the cable.