“Crystal’s Soapbox,” published each Thursday, is a column by conservative Texas mom Crystal Arcand who loves to rant about issues that relate to her kids….and yours.
Don’t get me wrong – I like educational television. I encourage KidGlue readers to watch some kind of nature or educational show each week in the TV for You and Me posts. I get disappointed when my four-year-old Bethany doesn’t want to watch Max & Ruby (though that could just be that I like to go around the house singing, “Max and Ruby; Ru-u-uby and Max!”). I just think it’s a little overboard to have television for preschoolers available literally 24 hours a day.
I mean, hello – you say “children” and “television” in the same sentence, and you unleash a diatribe from someone about how kids are watching too much television. There are studies and articles about it out the wazoo. But then you have channels aimed at kids, and even a channel specifically for preschoolers that have programs on around the clock. So do we really want to limit our children’s television viewing, or do we want them to shut up, sit down, and watch TV to get out of our hair?
I don’t think the great preschool TV debate will ever be settled once and for all. I don’t think we’ll ever really know if preschool TV really makes kids smarter. I don’t think that even matters at this point. What matters is common sense. Whether you believe educational viewing really makes children smarter or not, having it available to our children nonstop like a lit-up silver platter is just ridiculous.
And before you start flaming me in the comments – yes, I let my preschooler watch TV. Yes, I’ve let her watch it late at night when she was up. Yes, I’ve let her watch far too much of it. Maybe my agitation is really a desire for a cop-out – I could tell Bethy, “You have to go to bed – all your shows are off.” I used to tell her that her favorite character were “night-night.” Now she knows better.
How do you handle the nonstop preschool TV Really, I need to know. ‘Cuz it’s getting crazy watching The Upside-Down Show at ten o’clock at night.
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