Under 2's and TV

milliebear00001

clays_mummy wrote: »

not normally a poster just a lurker but thought id have my 2 pennies worth

id say 60% of the time me and my boy (29 months) were out and about either shopping, park, soft play or he comes with me to work (mobile hairdresser) so most of the time were out and about

the other 40% of the time, from the moment we get up the tv goes on and it stays on until i go to bed about midnight (baby 8pm)...he doesnt necessarily watch it all day as were in the garden, painting, baking etc but i have no problem if he was to watch tv for 2-3 hours a day.

not to infuriate people but as mothers, we are all entitled to make our own decisions with our children and from about 18 months he has had an ipod touch (bit of a pro at temple run) and i let him go on the laptop for one hour a day..

i see this only as a positive thing as at 26 months he could say his full alphabet AND sing it, recognise random letters and numbers not just by memory, sing and copy all mr tumbles sign language and is very advanced for his 2 and half years.

then again, he has no idea what the toilet is for so all babies do things at their own time...tv or no tv

Not criticising your choices at all, but just thought I might explain a bit more about some of the problems we see in schools that appear to be a pretty direct result of increased screen time for very young kids. It is not so much that the screen itself is the problem, it is the problems that come from a child not talking to or being talked to, by an adult, when they are in front of a screen. This phenomenon is fairly new, very obvious, and has a massively detrimental impact on children's ability to learn to read.

Put very simply, children who spend large amounts of time in front of a screen, are talked with less by an adult. This means they often have a vastly inferior oral vocab and understanding when they hit school, and this in turn, means they often find it much harder to learn to read well. Listening to a TV talk 'at you' is not at all the same as having somebody talk 'with you' for several hours each day, and it is this that makes the difference. Most Reception teachers of any experience, will be able to describe the increasing number of children who enter Reception classes with a poorer vocabulary than that of a generation ago.

jellyhead

Children don't seem to spend so much time reading or being read to nowadays. News reports on studies done before World Book Day are shocking, the amount of children they say don't own any books. I wonder what happens to the books they get free with Bookstart?

Tigsteroonie

fluffnutter wrote: »

Only cbeebies or DVDs. Nothing with adverts - I think ads are the devil's work, particularly for children, who simply don't have the critical faculties to see through the disingenuous hype.

See, I knew we had a peculiar little boy He adores the "Underdog" adverts, and even pays attention to the various bingo advert jingles ... But children's programmes? Nah :rotfl:

Person_one

milliebear00001 wrote: »

Not criticising your choices at all, but just thought I might explain a bit more about some of the problems we see in schools that appear to be a pretty direct result of increased screen time for very young kids. It is not so much that the screen itself is the problem, it is the problems that come from a child not talking to or being talked to, by an adult, when they are in front of a screen. This phenomenon is fairly new, very obvious, and has a massively detrimental impact on children's ability to learn to read.

Put very simply, children who spend large amounts of time in front of a screen, are talked with less by an adult. This means they often have a vastly inferior oral vocab and understanding when they hit school, and this in turn, means they often find it much harder to learn to read well. Listening to a TV talk 'at you' is not at all the same as having somebody talk 'with you' for several hours each day, and it is this that makes the difference. Most Reception teachers of any experience, will be able to describe the increasing number of children who enter Reception classes with a poorer vocabulary than that of a generation ago.

The bolded is the key there.

With no TV available those parents still wouldn't interact enough with their children and there are plenty of parents who allow a fair amount of TV but still spend lots of time talking and spending one to one time with their kids. Its also possible to watch TV very interactively with a chatty toddler!

A lot of children are also spending an awful lot of their time in nurseries where they don't get much one to one at all. I don't want that to sound like a guilt trip to parents who use nurseries because I completely understand that there aren't a lot of options, but the childcare system in this country is not right yet, it needs seriously looking at.

mildred1978

Tigsteroonie wrote: »

See, I knew we had a peculiar little boy He adores the "Underdog" adverts, and even pays attention to the various bingo advert jingles ...

Mine too!!! :rotfl:

delain

Squeak does like the ads when OH is watching TV... She does sometimes just shout 'EAGLE!' at random intervals

She also very much likes Dominic the Donkey from R1 at Christmas, she still says 'ee aww ee aww ya ya YAA' now and again and OH sings the whole song with her, which she loves, don't know if that counts as dodgy parenting or not :rotfl:

kj*daisy

Mine watched more tv than was probably good for them, but we did plenty of talking and stuff too, and reading books. It was a godsend to me when pregnant with no2, I could put a Thomas video on and doze while ds was safely sat next to me watching. They are both doing well at school so I don't have any regrets about it now. Tbh if you are concerned enough to think and ask about This your kids will probably be fine

jellyhead

delain wrote: »

Squeak does like the ads when OH is watching TV... She does sometimes just shout 'EAGLE!' at random intervals

She also very much likes Dominic the Donkey from R1 at Christmas, she still says 'ee aww ee aww ya ya YAA' now and again and OH sings the whole song with her, which she loves, don't know if that counts as dodgy parenting or not :rotfl:

Eagle? I have no idea what your post is about We record what we want to watch, then forward through the ads. I got into the habit when he wanted to watch 'Dora' and 'Go Diego Go' after a day out or a log walk, just to flop onto the sofa for a rest. If I'm tired too, and gasping for a cup of tea then I'm happy to put the TV on for a bit Those cable channels have so many adverts, it drove me crazy.

What's Dominic the Donkey? I remember singing a song from a catfood advert to my teenager when he was tiny :rotfl:

milliebear00001

jellyhead wrote: »

Children don't seem to spend so much time reading or being read to nowadays. News reports on studies done before World Book Day are shocking, the amount of children they say don't own any books. I wonder what happens to the books they get free with Bookstart?

Yes, this is true also - hence the Bookstart initiative which tried to address the dying of reading in many pre-schooler homes.

I work in a school where the children come from families who do still largely read regularly with their children, and recognise the importance of doing so. In other schools I've worked in, the difference has been stark and obvious.

Books expose children to all sorts of vacab they wouldn't experience in normal conversation. A child who has listened to a story like 'The Magic Faraway Tree', might be exposed (for example) to a word like 'entered', rather thsn just 'came in'. This means the word 'entered, will be much easier to read when they meet it in one of their reading books because they will already know what it means! Oral vocab and learning to read well are massively linked.

milliebear00001

Person_one wrote: »

The bolded is the key there.

With no TV available those parents still wouldn't interact enough with their children and there are plenty of parents who allow a fair amount of TV but still spend lots of time talking and spending one to one time with their kids. Its also possible to watch TV very interactively with a chatty toddler!

A lot of children are also spending an awful lot of their time in nurseries where they don't get much one to one at all. I don't want that to sound like a guilt trip to parents who use nurseries because I completely understand that there aren't a lot of options, but the childcare system in this country is not right yet, it needs seriously looking at.

I agree with quite a lot of this (poor-quality nursery care worries me too) but I actually do think that if parents had no screen options, they probably would talk and interact more with their young children. Not all of them obviously, but I think screens make easy babysitters that were not available to past generations. It's not so much that parents have suddenly become much more crap, but rather, that our parents would have liked the option of plonking us in front of a screen too, but couldn't, because they weren't available!

Certainly, I watched my two hours of children's programming when I was a preschooler, but the rest of the time my mum was forced to read/talk/shop/wash up/clean etc with and around me. I know she found this pretty boring a lot of the time.