Advice to Mothers

Our pediatrician, and every book I have been reading, gives the same advice: hold off on watching TV with your child as long as possible. The books say no TV for a child under 2 year old. This is great advice - and if you can do it, you are a better parent than I. I don’t have the patience to do this. Instead, I opt for watching TV responsibly with my son.

What do I mean responsibly? I mean no bad shows. The TV shows I watch with him are all sports, Jeopardy and videos. Sometimes we watch a cooking show. He likes cooking shows. Well - I think he really likes food and it just so happens that cooking shows have food on them.

But for videos - he loves Baby Einsten and Baby Genius. We also have Comcast, so we can watch the Micky Mouse cartoons OnDemand. They also have a whole section of “infant” stuff in the “Life and Home” section in the OnDemand area. It is great. There are shows in Russian, Spanish and other languages. There are tons of nursery rhyme shows, and even some baby karaoke where you can sing along to cartoons that are dancing while the songs are playing. He loves that activity.

But one of the shows I love best is Baby Einstein. The creators of this are just geniuses. They have taken music and words, and put them into what I call a PowerPoint presentation video. The Baby Mozart video is my son’s favorite. It plays Mozart songs, and then has pictures pop up on the screen. The pictures range from other babies doing things, to a ball, to some of their cartoons on the screen. It is fabulous. I can put him with his toys, put the movie on, and make dinner, do laundry etc.

But I use it responsibly. He has a short attention span - which is why his toys are there. he watches, then plays, then watches, then plays. Only for about 30 minutes, and then I come back and am his main source of entertainment.

But I am not that patient a person, so if you can handle it - I am sure the expert advice is best. But for the rest of us, we do what we have to do to get by, and sometimes that means using videos.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS