PlayIsTheWork.com

It’s been a crazy busy time for all of us at Braincandy – we begin filming the rest of our series next week and couldn’t be more excited!! I haven’t had a chance to blog of late but couldn’t resist passing this article along to all of our PlayIsTheWork community. It resonated so strongly with me and really do think it’s worth a read. A columnist from the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article (”All this fretting about kids’ TV is a real turn off”) commenting on why “Turn off the TV Week” is simply a band-aid for inconsistent absent parenting. In other words, if parents aren’t controlling children’s access to the TV or creating boundaries around the type of content and amount of time they engage in the first place, something like “Turn off the TV Week” isn’t going to solve the issues. It might make parents feel better but it does nothing to create changes in how we as parents integrate a device that likely will always have some role in our lives and that of our children.

In the article, Tim Goodman discusses an early experience he had with covering children’s media when PBS was presenting “Teletubbies” to the U.S. market, and creator Anne Wood was about to face a roomful of critics who thought she was a Mistress of the Dark Arts. Now I’ll admit, the first time I saw “Teletubbies” I thought it had to be created by people who were doing drugs, but as I became a student of children’s media I began to understand the principles behind the series. There were specific things within the show that resonated with my own children like the smiley baby in the sun. The point I’m making and I think is articulated well in Goodman’s article is that media is a part of our culture and it continues to make an impact. There is good media that clearly has educational and entertainment value and then there is media that’s not so good. We are the parents and we get to decide what is appropriate. Rather than believing we can extricate this from our lives or that we need to, why not open our minds to the possibility that there is good content out there that is socially and emotionally wholesome and educationally stimulating for our kids and for us. What do you think?

Posted on May 2nd, 2007 by Administrator
Filed under: Uncategorized