Hi everyone, just found this and thought you may be interested.  http://www.fisheaters.com/strangerinyourhouse.htm x

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Couldn’t get your link to work, I have found the article anyway.  Interesting angle to take.  As someone with no TV and who grew up without one it reaffirms my decision to be TV free.

Thank you for sharing.

Oh sorry, I’m not good at links!

I’ve read that article too, and another one similar recently.

We don’t have a TV license and only use the TV *very* occasionally to watch things we have streamed or downloaded. I feel really strongly about not letting my daughter watch TV at her age (21 months) because of all the things I have read about how unnervingly damaging it is to their formative development. I know Steiner/Waldorf educators are big on this too, and I’ve enjoyed reading what some have written on the effect TV has on the ‘incarnating’ child, but it’s all the research papers that really got me…

Having never been a big Disney fan, we recently started letting my daughter watch Tangled as she seemed to really like it. I do too. However, it does still contain quite a lot of violence, however mild it may be, and aggression, and a whole lot of other things which I wasn’t comfortable with. Interestingly, my husband and I noticed that she was more frantic and more likely to ‘bang’ things, and us, on days when she had watched it. Her whole energy seemed to change, if I’m being honest.

We still don’t know where exactly we sit on the TV subject in terms of no TV at all, or only a film occasionally, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we ended up getting rid of it completely. I’m a huge film fanatic, so it’s hard for me to imagine not having it there as an option for films, but I also love how much more harmonious and creative our home is when the TV is not on for days. And it is undeniable that it is a very unnatural, overstimulating source of information for teeny tiny ones…not surprising it is so damaging really.

Thanks guys, interesting comments. My son who is 10 nearly 11, loves guns and I hate them!! He watches a bit of tv, but it’s usually The Disney channel. He is a lovely boy, very caring and polite, but I still don’t like the guns!!

My son likes guns too.  He watches DVDs through a projector, but I have ‘control’ over what he watches that way.  He has not watched anything aggressive or violent.  I think guns are part of growing up as boys.  My brothers did this too, again with no TV, they are now very gentle adults who I could never imagine lashing out physically at anyone.

yes agree with sustainablemum. Boys/guns is a whole other thread, but I think its developmentally normal. Some boys are into fighting with wands or pretending to be knights, others, for some unknown reason, go for guns. I don’t see any difference, its all about killing and dominance IMO and seems to be a stage they seem to need to go through-or at least every boy I can think of does. I think there’s a rather funny snobbery thing some parents have around wands/swords/guns, where shouting “avada kedavra” (the killing spell from Harry Potter) is some kind of evidence of intellectual superiority, playing swordfighting is a sign of chivalry and moral superiority (!) and then guns are what the stupid kids who spend 24/7 watching violent 18 movies are meant to play. So the fact that all these kids are ALL pretending to kill each other is kind of missed. Its “horribly normal” imo. My kids do it and they’ve almost never watched broadcast tv, and watch a (kids) film maybe once a month. I think what’s really going on is that we are confronted with a side of our boys that we all, truly, hoped they did not have. Who wants to realise that their perfect baby, despite being carried in a sling and breastfed on demand, has actually grown up to (seemingly) have no problem with pretending to kill their friends? A lot of this, for me, is about meeting our kids where they are, and finding a way to be respectful of them while teaching them to be respectful of others.

The only caveat I have is to remember that there are people walking around for whom seeing gunplay may actually stir up horrible memories, and that although, truly, our kids are innocently playing around with these ideas, actual gun use is a scary and terribly harmful thing. Partly for this reason I will not actually buy a toy gun for my kids, nor will I allow one in the house or for them to play with them unless I am very sure of who is around. I’ve talked to my kids about real gun issues - Amnesty has some good resources. I truly and utterly do not believe that playing with guns makes kids any less clear about the morality of real gun use. Gun / wand/ sword play is really, IMHO, a prop for them to work through some far more complex ideas about good vs evil, right vs wrong, whether might= right and so on. And its a pretty fun game where the rules are simple and straightforward.

I can think of so many adult men who are not only very gentle but vehemently opposed to gun decriminalisation, police brutality, etc, who are far more pacifistic than I am, who nevertheless played with guns as children.

I’m with Edith, gun play - happy with it in our house, as long as not as us and time spent playing it is limited - we come from a military family, he will be taught to use firearms safely.

As for tv, I think it can be really good. We don’t have a tv license, so we stream/youtube/DVD’s.

Whilst we don’t use it everyday, it’s not a babysitter, sometimes we will put something on for Ru if he wants it. Not every time he asks, mind you though.

On this topic before, I remember a Mama posting that tv ‘makes children turn off’, and another Mama responding that we as adults need ‘switch off’ time, why shouldn’t children need
it too? Which is a very fair point.

Sometimes if Ru needs sitting down/switch off time, he’ll read books (alone, or with us), sometimes he draws and sometimes he just wants to watch some television.

Maybe if the tv or films are affecting a child a lot, it may be because they’re not exposed to them that often, so it does affect them more.

Maybe it’s an age thing too. Ru used to be more aggressive after certain films, but they just don’t seem to have the same effect now. Maybe this is because we recently read Playful Parenting and have incorporated more ‘aggressive’, rough-and-tumble play into our days, so it presents itself there, instead of in response to the film.

Also, I have to say, Edith made the most amazing gunplay point EVER!

“I truly and utterly do not believe that playing with guns makes kids any less clear about the morality of real gun use. Gun / wand/ sword play is really, IMHO, a prop for them to work through some far more complex ideas about good vs evil, right vs wrong, whether might= right and so on.”

We’re thinking through alot of this now.  No license here. We are watching star trek dvd’s, which we started as a treat for the adults. Connor is very taken with it now, refering the characters ( fixing things like Scotty, helping people feel better like McCoy).

But there is alot of violence, more than I remember, and so we’re talking alot about how we treat others.  It’s not how I thought we’d do it, and I can’t say that we wont revisit this choice.

Thanks everyone. I do feel better now about the TV and the guns, thank you so much for all your long pieces of writing. xxxxx