Susan, my sister, brother and I all grew up with televisions in our bedrooms, but for a different reason -- our father was a television repairman, and often had small sets that people abandoned instead of paying to fix. So he'd fix them anyway, bring them in the house and find a home for them. I was older by the time this started, but my siblings were probably 7 and 6. So they always had a television available in their rooms.
I'm not sure it took the place of other family time, really. We all ate dinner together, we had lots of outside time, and we are all voracious readers. But it did give us the ability to watch something other than what our parents wanted to watch in the living room (and they didn't have to be subjected to some teenybopper kid show, lol).
To this day, when one of us has trouble falling asleep, all we have to do is turn the television on. It somehow communicates safety and comfort to have a low monotonal sound in the room. The weather channel or CSPAN are perfect for this. It's ideal for those nights when the voice in my head is so loud with thought that I can't get to sleep. Somehow, having the tv on quiets that voice and I doze off pretty quickly.
I think, as with so many things, that the danger is not that there's a television IN the room, but how it's monitored. If it's on all the time, that's obviously not a good thing. But if it's used as any other toy or pastime is used -- as fun, as a reward, as an option -- I'm not against it all. And personally, I'd probably add a small DVD player, just to keep the twenty-one-hundredth viewing of "Monsters, Inc." somewhat contained...
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Susan, my sister, brother and I all grew up with televisions in our bedrooms, but for a different reason -- our father was a television repairman, and often had small sets that people abandoned instead of paying to fix. So he'd fix them anyway, bring them in the house and find a home for them. I was older by the time this started, but my siblings were probably 7 and 6. So they always had a television available in their rooms.
I'm not sure it took the place of other family time, really. We all ate dinner together, we had lots of outside time, and we are all voracious readers. But it did give us the ability to watch something other than what our parents wanted to watch in the living room (and they didn't have to be subjected to some teenybopper kid show, lol).
To this day, when one of us has trouble falling asleep, all we have to do is turn the television on. It somehow communicates safety and comfort to have a low monotonal sound in the room. The weather channel or CSPAN are perfect for this. It's ideal for those nights when the voice in my head is so loud with thought that I can't get to sleep. Somehow, having the tv on quiets that voice and I doze off pretty quickly.
I think, as with so many things, that the danger is not that there's a television IN the room, but how it's monitored. If it's on all the time, that's obviously not a good thing. But if it's used as any other toy or pastime is used -- as fun, as a reward, as an option -- I'm not against it all. And personally, I'd probably add a small DVD player, just to keep the twenty-one-hundredth viewing of "Monsters, Inc." somewhat contained...
March 19, 2009 - 8:33amThis Comment
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