I have four children.
The three girls are 5 1/2, 4, and 2 1/2. My son is 11 months. We live
in the suburbs, we have no sidewalks, and there is a very busy street
behind our house.
We spend our time talking, playing, taking walks, planting gardens,
going to the park, reading books, coloring...so many things. We decorated
straw hats one evening. As the baby gets older, I am looking forward
to being able to spend time teaching the girls to bake and doing crafts.
The kids are never occupied with television, so they always run and
greet their daddy when he walks in from work. He is their favorite toy.
We don't have millions of toys. They are quite creative. They can turn
a doily into a doll blanket. They play house, church, visiting...so
many things they come up with. They sit quietly with each other and
look at books. They are very observant and notice very tiny things.
A slug, a ladybug, the spider crawling down the wall... They don't need
constant entertainment because they haven't been trained to have short
attention spans.
I so rarely hear from them that they are bored. Living in the Pacific
Northwest means a lot of rainy days. Some children would mope in front
of the television, but my girls see rain as a golden opportunity to
play in the water. They would rather play outside on a rainy day.
My kids have very simple tastes. They aren't seeing every toy from commercials
and dying if they don't get them all. As a matter of fact, I don't think
they know of any toys out there that are popular beyond Barbie dolls.
They aren't spending a lot of time coveting.
By not spending our time in front of a television, we are able to see
where our kids are needing boosts in character development. We hope
to raise good, godly young people. That means we cannot allow anyone
else to raise them, Hollywood included.
Granted, getting free time is difficult. But, there are many days I
can sit and do my e-mail while I listen to them playing happily in the
other room. They still take naps, and that is a great time for a little
break.
I grew up on television. There are things I should never have seen.
The glimpses of television I get now make me doubly sure that the kids
don't need to be exposed to it because the stuff is worse now than when
I was small.
We want our kids to know that we have a fine family. They can only know
that if we are actively engaged with them. Television is the great disengager.
We want our children to have a safe place when they get home from school.
They can't have that if the TV is on. There are things on television
that are too disturbing to allow us to make a safe place. We have such
a few number of years with them. Why waste them?
Jennifer
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