Those who know me know that I'm pretty anal about how much television my children watch each day, and even more so, what they watch.
Don't worry, as a girl who was watching Night on Elm Street while preschool aged and who consumed Fly and The Simpsons regularly while in elementary school, the humor of this is not lost on me.
Mostly the babes watch Curious George, Daniel Tiger, Dora/Diego, or the Leapfrog videos. There are others of course, but that's the gist of it. And if we're being totally honest, I'm not really pro-Dora/Diego either, but it works in the car and I don't despise it enough to say "no," although J typically vetoes it if he's driving.
And for the most part, they're only allowed TV while we're in the car. On rare occasions they get it at home - super early in the mornings, if a sitter is with them, or if I know we're not going to leave the house at all that day. For us, it works. Mostly.
Well, yesterday I really wanted to finish up B's comforter for his bed. Since we'll be out of town again shortly, I don't have much time to get things done around here. Since my littler helpers were being a bit too helpful, I decided to let them watch a movie. This greatly excited them and H ran over to her movie bin to see what she wanted. Unfortunately, I had taken pretty much all the DVDs out of their cases and put them in the car for our recent drive to Minnesota and had not yet returned them to their proper homes. With snow outside and me still in my pj's, I decided to break a few rules.
"Well," I told H, "We have some other movies," and I showed her a secret stash that J had put in the "banned" section of the cabinet. They were mostly all Disney, since he has some weird issue with them, especially the princesses. I'm not really for or against Disney. I loved Disney as a kid. I love Disney World. I deeply dislike Cinderella, but otherwise, I'm pretty indifferent.
Well, H picked up each DVD carefully, analysing them, (Rango and The Incredibles were immediately vetoed by Momma as very not kid appropriate for the meantime) and she finally settled on The Little Mermaid.
A girl after my own heart.
This was my favorite movie when I was her age. I could watch it over and over and over again. Although the sea witch always terrified me.
Of course, I immediately figured we wouldn't make it very far before H demanded me turn it off. That's what typically happens when we try to watch an actual movie.
Has anyone seen The Lorax?
Well, I haven't. Not passed the first ten minutes anyway. That's when my sweet daughter informed me that it wasn't nice and she didn't want to watch it. So off it went.
Well, I have seen The Little Mermaid and knew there was plenty in it that was not nice.
And yet....oh, yet. She was not phased. At all.
In fact, she loved it! She sat the entire 84 minutes of it and let me finish B's quilt. Woo hoo!
She hasn't mentioned it since, which is probably good. Other than to tell her papa that Momma let her watch it. To which he just kind of raised his eye brows and said, "Really? No. Why princesses?"
Though seriously, he can't save her from the princess epidemic. Even without having ever seen them, she is still drawn to them in the stores. She still likes to pretend she is one. Movies or not.
But I learned something yesterday. It's really hard to ease up sometimes.
It's easy to create arbitrary and ridiculous rules and forget why exactly you put them into place in the first place.
Obviously we don't condone violence. We don't want our children exposed to it as much as possible until they are able to understand the difference between reality and pretend.
Because they are so little they pick up on everything. Hence I have an almost 3-year-old who properly uses "Holy shit!"
But really, we just didn't want little TV minions who were glued to the TV every day. We wanted children with imaginations who could function without something blinking in front of their faces. We wanted kids who could play and entertain themselves when needed, not be dependent on an electronic baby sitter.
And we do have those kids. And it's okay to "break the rules" on occasions. They won't be ruined forever. They won't become TV zombies overnight.
But they still are not allowed to watch Caillou or Max and Ruby.
There are some things I just won't budge on.
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