Thoughts on television

One of the speakers in sacrament meeting yesterday* talked about the distractions in our lives and how they make mothering more difficult. I thought of a whole load of the things that distract me from mothering....school work, gardening, training the puppy, my regular work, wanting to run more, BLOGGING (;-))....the list goes on. As I was thinking of my distractions, I tuned back in to the speaker, and realized that he was talking about the evils of television and cartoons, and how they can dominate your home.

And my simple response was "This is why I don't own a television." I say simple, because it really is. It's that easy. If television is eating your kids, don't own one. Donate it. Throw it away.

Now, does this mean that we don't allow outside influences into our home in the interest of "protecting" my kids? No. We watch movies on the computer (we even got a projector for when we want to have the cousins over and have movie night), we go to the library and get various shows on DVD and watch them. But my kids have a set amount of "TV time" that they're allowed to use each day. They decide what they want to watch, and when, but once their time is used up, that's it for the day.

Of all of the things that threaten our relationships with our children, I'd say television is a pretty easy one to deal with.

* Note that I did NOT comment on sacrament meeting yesterday as a whole. That's because I'm still reeling over all the things that were weird and wrong in the "praise to Mothers" (capitalized because of course we're talking about imagined Mothers rather than real ones) program....not least of which the fact that not one single woman spoke!