I am a television
scholar who boo-hoo’s most of the criticisms thrown at the medium. I advocate for active viewing practices and
buy completely into the argument that complex television programs actually play
a role in the smartening (rather than the “dumbing down”) of culture. (For more on this latter argument see Steven
Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You). But despite my championing for the medium,
my dual role as a scholar-mother has made me a bit weary when it comes to the
debates concerning the detrimental effects of screen time on infants and toddlers.
For the
first year of my oldest daughter’s life I was pretty good about limiting her
exposure to television. I played a few
Einstein learning videos but rarely turned on any of the kids channels. Although I wasn’t quite convinced by any of
the studies, I fought my partner (who enjoys television as a constant background
noise companion) on keeping the television off during the day when at all
possible. When I had my second child
this past winter (with only a 16 month gap between the two), my strong stance
on television viewing diminished out of necessity. Having a temperamental toddler and a needy
infant to deal with, I decided I’d accept any tool into my parenting
toolbox. Enter Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
I
actually like Disney Junior’s Mickey
Mouse Clubhouse for the most part.
Like most children’s programming of today, it has educational value; its
stresses problem solving, taps into the children’s musical intelligence, and
helps with word/concept acquisition through repetitive songs and narrative
patterns. But that’s not really why I liked it at first. In truth, what I liked the most (during our
early viewing days) was the way my daughter’s face lit up and she clapped when
she saw the opening credits come and the cute way she said “O’Toodle” when
prompted by the screen to call on one of the main characters. A few months later, I found myself equally as
delighted when she started singing and dancing along with the closing credits
(as we parents find most of our children’s performances to be cute). However, lately she has started demanding the
show at all hours of the day, to which I won’t comply. I have struggled to curb her appetite for the
show and have had to fight toddler tantrums when I limit viewing to a half hour
in the morning at breakfast and a half hour at night before bedtime. I have justified that formula being that it
put her overall screen time to less than an hour a day.
Of
course that one hour a day is also one hour a day that my three month old
infant is now being exposed to the television set and it found me wondering
about the American Academy of Pediatrics’s (AAP) suggestions that children
under the age of two watch no television at all. I found myself reading parenting articles
about the pros and cons of the exposing young children to technology gadgets
and screen time. I found myself watching
the infamous YouTube video of the child who could not flip through a magazine
seeing it instead as a broken iPad which would not interact with her when she
“clicked” on images or “scrolled” across the pages. I read the studies that found that while
young children today are more proficient at technology when they enter grade
school that they are lagging behind in other areas linked to fine and large
motor skills (e.g. tying shoes; riding bikes).
(Of course, as one article pointed out, these lags are temporary: to date no one has graduated high school
unable to tie his shoes due to early exposure to computer screens.)
While I
stressed about all of these things and the decisions I have yet to be faced
with (we have yet to exposure our children to computers, iPods, or iPads,
although many friends have praised this app or that in terms its usability for
children), I began to remember an article I teach to my freshman composition
students. Ariel Gore’s essay, “TV Can Be a Good Parent,” discusses the AAP’s
recommendations concerning television exposure and their outrageous suggestion
that pediatricians ask parents about their children’s media consumption
patterns so that such data could be monitored.
Gore acknowledges AAP’s valid arguments for recommending that television
be limited but also counters many of their claims by discussing various
educational programming and noting that parents can interact with children
while watching television. She also
points out the fact that while going without a television set is an option for
some – she gives the example of her own artist mother who was participated in
communal daycare—it is not an option for her.
Ultimately, Gore argues that many of the AAP’s policies seem to rest on
assumptions that all parents are middle class or higher, that all mothers have
the option to stay at home, and that they all have partners or supportive
people who can nurture their kids when they cannot. It is the closing of her essay that inspired
this essay:
We
need more – and better – educational programming on TV. We need to end the culture of war and the
media’s glorification of violence. We
need living-wage jobs. We need
government salaries for stay-at-home moms so that all women have a real career
choice. We do not need “media files” in
our pediatricians’ offices or more guilt about being bad parents. Give me… a commune of artists to share
parenting responsibilities, and I’ll kill my TV without any provocation from
the AAP at all. Until then, long live
Big Bird, “The Brady Bunch” and all their very special friends!
I always
found this article incredibly convincing as a pre-parent and knew that I, too,
would someday find television to be an ally in the battle of parenting. So, it’s not surprising that there are days
when Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is my
best friend as it distracts my oldest child so I can feed the youngest. Or that it helped me fill the hours during my
oldest child’s nine-day hospital stay while she recovered from pneumonia. But moreover, it made me realize that Gore is
right. Television is part of the virtual
community that we have at our disposal to help with childrearing, while an
actual physical community is often lacking.
The old
adage is that it takes a village to raise a child, and I believe it. I am lucky enough to have friends who I
participate in babysitting trades with so we can attend work functions or have
a rare date night out with our partners.
We have play dates that allow us to have adult interaction while our
kids romp around at our feet. I have
borrowed so many baby clothes that I have had to spend very few dollars of my
own on attire for my children and I’ve paid it forward by loaning clothes out
in return, as well as larger baby items (e.g. swings and jumpers) so that other
friends wouldn’t have to foot the expense for such over-priced items. But despite all of that help there is still
plenty that my community cannot do.
While my kids attend the same daycare as one of my closest friends (and we
live only blocks apart from one another), we cannot take turns carpooling to
daycare because of pesky laws about car seats (and the limited seating space in
my non-SUV family vehicle doesn’t help either).
And while my friends and I help each other out for special occasions,
for most of the regular week we are all on our parenting islands alone –
cooking, cleaning, childrearing, etc. My
village is comprised of all dual-income families with mothers who work outside
of the home just as the fathers do. That
doesn’t leave much room for the utopic vision of women tending to the children
of other women alongside their own. But
at least I have my borrowed clothes and scheduled play dates.
There
are more services that I wish were in place in our country to help mothers and families. I wish the U.S. was not ranked among the
lowest, in comparison to other first world countries, in terms of its Family
Leave/Care policies. I wish we had legislation
in place that paid for early preschool or helped to fund daycare for parents
who need it. I wish that our country
rewarded (rather than inadvertently penalized) mothers for working outside of
the home, as other countries do. I wish
our Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) allowed parents to spend more time at home
with their young children without consequence.
(The meager 12 weeks of unpaid leave we are granted pales in comparison
to countries like Italy which provides citizens with 22 weeks of full-paid
leave or Sweden which grants it citizens with one year of paid leave; Sweden is
especially noteworthy as their egalitarian practices are evident in their leave
policies. Upon the birth of a child a
woman can take up to a year off of work at 90% pay but the country tries to
encourage men to do this as well by offering men a year off at 100%.) If we had some of these things in place like
most of the developed world, perhaps I wouldn’t need to give my daughter her
daily dose of televised toddler crack… but since we don’t, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse will be on in my house at least two times a
day so that I can parent in the best way that I know how.
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