Saw this on Planningfamily.com:
"On average, children two to five years old spend 32 hours a week in front of a TV and they will have watched an average of 8,000 murders before they finish elementary school. Is this replacing healthy activities such as playing outside, eating dinner as a family, reading, and building family unity? Well-planned family time can be a foundation for joy and influence to last a lifetime. Family time provides your children with feelings of love, security, stability, and support.
"If you are trying to conceive, or are pregnant, the TV could still be getting in the way of your relationship. The average adult watches more than 28 hours of TV a week (that's two straight months a year)! If you're stuck in a rut, if TV has taken over, or if you aren't sure what activities will keep everyone happy, here are some helpful hints for fun family-time activities. Put the remote down and play on!"
Wow - disturbing stats. Do you think that's true? Needless to say, I promptly printed out the "backyard games" list, so Frisbee, here we come!
~Ally
"On average, children two to five years old spend 32 hours a week in front of a TV and they will have watched an average of 8,000 murders before they finish elementary school. Is this replacing healthy activities such as playing outside, eating dinner as a family, reading, and building family unity? Well-planned family time can be a foundation for joy and influence to last a lifetime. Family time provides your children with feelings of love, security, stability, and support.
"If you are trying to conceive, or are pregnant, the TV could still be getting in the way of your relationship. The average adult watches more than 28 hours of TV a week (that's two straight months a year)! If you're stuck in a rut, if TV has taken over, or if you aren't sure what activities will keep everyone happy, here are some helpful hints for fun family-time activities. Put the remote down and play on!"
Wow - disturbing stats. Do you think that's true? Needless to say, I promptly printed out the "backyard games" list, so Frisbee, here we come!
~Ally
2 comments:
I'm so glad you are aware of this issue! Especially the part about "Well-planned family time can be a foundation for joy and influence to last a lifetime. Family time provides your children with feelings of love, security, stability, and support." These inter-personal advantages can never be replaced by anything electronic. It might not be easy, but I hope you can stick to your goals for a loving family!
I have so much to say about this topic, Allison! I'll try to be concise. Too much electronic interaction is ruining our kids (and us adults). Our kids need down time, time to read, time to be bored, time to play outside, and time from us for eye-to-eye, I'm-really-listening-to-you conversation: it's the only way to figure out how to be a good parent (and even then there's so much we miss). We find we really need lots of quiet. It's in the quiet times, when I'm not asking questions, when no noise is filling the air, that the truth comes out. We already watch no T.V. with the girls here at home (except a movie or a home video maybe once a week in an evening): they never see ads for toys they don't need, people acting in inappropriately sexy ways on pretty much every show/ad on T.V., or news stories about worrying topics. It makes a huge difference. We're now pretty sure we're ditching the car DVD player, which we've used only on long trips, but which sucks up some wonderful time we could all be having together, and which makes the kids frazzled on long trips. It's better to have quiet, talk, look out the window, read, and listen to the Beatles. :) Oh - and no Wii, no gameboys, no iAnything for us or our kids. Was that concise? Not very, I suppose, but I really think electronic media overuse is at the root of SO many problems today, so I feel strongly about it.
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