Repeated movie/TV watching...help me understand, please?

[Teresa]

Hi, all.

I was guilty of seriously curtailing my almost 4 year old's TV watching until the last six months or so. (And I came around to it thanks in part to all the Unschooling reading I was doing!) I now pick out movies at the library with my son weekly, and we watch them together, and I can see his enjoyment of the shows, of our time together, and of the interesting new things he's learning.

It's typical, when we get a new video, say, a Magic School bus video (his current favorite), for him to want to watch it three or four times in a row. He usually watches a long block in the morning, then a long block again in the afternoon. By long I mean an hour or more.

It's hard for me to sit and watch that much TV with him, but I have weird feelings about leaving him alone sitting in front of the TV. I don't know where this weird feeling comes from, and certainly his sitting there allows me to get the dishes done, actually finish a load of laundry, pay bills, nurse the baby quietly, etc., but I can't tell if this aversion of mine is intuition or cultural baggage.

Has anyone else experienced this? Have thoughts to share? Thanks!

[Starr Sheppard-Decker]

This has been a great thread to read with lots of juicy stuff! I, too, was pretty "strict" in my son's TV/Movie viewing. He basically got one a day, and that was it. I liked what you said, Teresa, about 'cultural baggage'. That is exactly what it was. I thought that if I let my son be in front of the TV all the time, then I was using it as a sitter and felt really guilty and like a horrible parent. This summer I read The Unprocessed Child, and it really helped me get out of this pattern. And yes, sometimes I feel like he watches too much stuff. And sometimes my husband gets concerned when he'll just talk about a movie he is really starting to understand and he'll talk about it like it is the only thing that matters. But in the end, he's happy, and I can let myself off the hook a bit. When we watch stuff together, its great... when he ends up going upstairs while I do dishes, that is fine, too. :)

STarr