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If it works for your family then good for you. I think that tv can be used as a great learning tool if done properly. I enjoy watching a litle tv, so it would not work for me to remove it completely. It sounds like it is working well for your family!
But we go months now without seeing any blood. And this all corresponds with eliminating the TV. Coincidence, maybe?
Or possibly the elimination of all the violent images (cartoons are the worst)they were seeing helps?
Full disclosure: I'm not a big fan of banning TV. I AM a fan of monitoring what they watch. I'm also a fan of being the parent and walking over and turning the channel (or turning it off) when something is on you don't want them to see.
My siblings and I grew up with the Road Runner cartoons. Violence out the wazoo. It didn't make any of us throw each other off a cliff.
I'm glad you've found a solution. But I think part of the problem was (as you admitted) you were just plunking them in front of the set and expecting the tube to be the baby sitter. That rarely ends well.
Just for kicks: Ask them sometime why they felt the need to draw blood. If they say because X did it on television then there's your answer. But if they say it's because Sibling made them mad and they deserved it, you might want to think about that.
I think a whole lot of what you see happening is because you decided to PARENT. (You made the decision to chuck the TV whether they liked it or not.) And for that: Good on you. Though I would like to know what else you've changed, because I'm suspecting the TV is only part of it.
TV isn't inherently bad. Books aren't inherently good.
The idea that one form of entertainment is better than the other is just silly.
TV can be great fun, it can be educational, and it can be downright brainless. So can books. Same can be said for the internet. They only become problems if you let them become problems. Reality is kids will be more and more exposed to "screens" as they get older, I think teaching them how to manage those tools is more important then eliminating but different strokes and all...
TV isn't inherently bad. Books aren't inherently good.
The idea that one form of entertainment is better than the other is just silly.
TV can be great fun, it can be educational, and it can be downright brainless. So can books. Same can be said for the internet. They only become problems if you let them become problems. Reality is kids will be more and more exposed to "screens" as they get older, I think teaching them how to manage those tools is more important then eliminating but different strokes and all...
I'm with both of you. The TV and internet are full of stumbling blocks (for blind people), but certainly can be used for good. My family proved over and over again we could not use the tv responsibly, so we had to jettison the thing. This clearly is not the solution for everybody else. But i do want to say, if any of your families are in the same place as mine, it can be done. I had a tv growing up and for all of my life, so this is a much bigger change for me than for my kids.
Whenever i tell the story of tearing up the paper with 7 boxes and 6 checks marks to friends, that one always gets to everyone. If you could have seen how ludicrous it was - but also how proud my wife was of me when I told it to her when she got home that night (and how glad she was that it was me and not her who had to do it).
I guess I'm telling this story partly for the entertainment value, and partly in case any of you parents are thinking about ridding yourself of your tv, an obvious potential pitfall to effective child raising. A little background:
My kids are all under the age of 11 and had access to tv all their lives. With our oldest kids, they were screen addicted from an early age due to exhausted parents using the tv as babysitter. In the last few years, we regained our parenting energy and began to limit our kids' screen time based on current research showing that more screen times equals more problems. We had our kids down to about 4-5 hours of screen time per week when we decided to use the tv as leverage to fix another problem our kids were having, that is fighting with each other. Sometimes their fights were quite violent and often concluded with scratch marks, bruises and/or blood. Not acceptable.
Based on advice we got from parenting guru John Rosemond (he's surely not for everybody), we instituted a plan to stop the fighting. I took a piece of paper and drew 7 blank boxes on it. The first day they had a fight, we took away their TV privelidges for 7 days. Each day the kids did not fight, they got a check mark in the box. If they had a fight, i tore up the paper and made them draw a new one - with 7 blank boxes again. No TV until they could go 7 days without a fight.
Would you believe it took them 5 months to go a full week without a fight? That means for 5 months, there was NO TV IN THE HOUSE! It was such an amazing 5 months. My 8 year old start doing word finds and cross word puzzles every morning when he got up. He and his older brother took up an interest in basketball and baseball and would spend hours in the backyard playing ball with each other (that admittedly sometimes still ended in a bloody nose or shouting or punching). My 4 year old daughter would spend hours drawing pictures to give to her parents and school mates. It was really an amazing transformation.
One day in about the 4th month of this "test" for the kids, they were on day 7 without a fight. My wife was out for the night and the kids were no more than 5 minutes away from bedtime (and winning back the tv) when I saw it happen in the backyard. My 8 year old son punched his older brother. So I did what any good parent would do... I walked to my bedroom on the other side of the house and shut the door. You see, i was rooting for them to get the tv back. I felt so sorry for them. At 6:59 (a minute before their week of no fights was up), my 8 year old barges into my bedroom and screams that his brother hit him. Ten seconds later, his older brother comes in the room (obviously more aware of what was at stake) screaming at his younger brother, "what have you done!!! You're ruining my life!!" I looked at the clock and it read 7pm. Then I told my boys to follow me to the kitchen. I proceeded to take the paper with the 7 boxes and 6 check marks off the refridgerator and tore it up in front of them. They literally began to wail. Just out right sobbing from both. I then sent them to bed and eventually went back to my bedroom where I admit I may have shed a tear in private. Probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do as a parent.
It was only 3 or 4 weeks later they finally got their 7 check marks. About 3 weeks after that, we informed them we were getting rid of the tv. They cried again that night, but interestingly, the next morning I woke up and found them shooting hoops in the backyard together during what would have been their tv time slot. Nobody's missed the TV a day since, and our lives seem so much better - free'd from the prison that is television.
What do you all think? Good stuff, or nutty parents?
If my kids could not watch tv without violent fights I would worry what was wrong with my kids. I don't think you're nutty I just think that you have not identified the source of your problem. It's not tv.
^^^^^^^^I agree completely with this statement. I think the withdrawal of the beloved tv was used as a tool to get the kids to stop beating each other up. What is alraming is that it took them as long as it did to not physically fight each other. I think their is a deeper issue here then watching the tv.
I don't think the TV was the source of the problem. The OP kids now had more time to spend and were simply spending it together (or doing their individual pursuits)... so they had a really bumpy start. They've obviously been to work it out, however long it took.
I'm step Mom to 3 and Mom to 4 and never a drop of blood was shed in my house. I would be more worried about the blood shed among siblings than too much TV. It's can't all be from TV.
Incredible! I really need to do this, but for myself. My kid watches 20mins in the morning and maybe 30mins at night during the weekday and about 1-2hrs a day on Sat and Sun. We need to cut the tv and cut back on computer time a lot, but I don't want to miss MY shows
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I don't want to miss MY shows
