Time Off!

I know it’s been quite some time since my previous blog. My hubby, R went to the Himalayas for 10 days and I went to my mom’s place to take a lil bit time off my mommyhood. We all become such lazy bums at mom’s place. So I was watching TV, catching up on some reading had lots of time to sleep, didn’t cook for full 10 days. But now life’s back to those normal routine days.

At my mom’s place I saw all the TV I can – neengalum vellalam oru kodi (I never saw this before and wanted to see how Surya hosts), super singer, movies, news channels etc. and Pal got to watch lots of cartoons and ended up watching lots of fighting scenes (which was the bad part). What’s so special about this? You may wonder, well we do not have a TV at home. It was a combined decision by R and myself that we’ll not buy a TV. It’s been close to a year since we moved to our house and we are still going strong.

And so I was wondering, not having TV actually makes a world of difference to our lives. One, whether it affects Pal or not I end up watching all the crap and thus exposing him to it too. Also I may not have gotten all this time to spend with him, do activities with him if that time goes to TV time. We spend lot of time playing, drawing, telling stories and most of all reading. Pal loves books and loves to be read to before his nap time as well as before hitting the bed in the night.

Another important reason pediatricians recommend not to expose kids to television is no matter how educational and kid friendly it is, it is a very passive medium. Kids learn best when they put all their senses into it like touching, feeling, smelling, moving etc. Even audio is fine as it improves their creativity.

But that doesn’t mean that he does not experience any screen time. I show him stuff in you tube, download some movies and he watches rhymes in the boom box. But otherwise he gets to listen to a lot of songs since my source of entertainment too is from radio and the internet ofcourse. When we tell this to people, some of them react as though life without TV is just not possible. But we are so used to it now.

Also I realised that most of the time we only waste our time flipping through channels and not watching anything properly. And news channels? They are much worse than reality shows. So in case any of you are wondering if your child is too adddicted to the TV, please sell it off. Our lives will still go on without it.

Ps: If your husband insists that he’ll miss his IPL, tell him he can anyway watch it online ;-)

swetha