I am getting rid of my t.v.!

[souvenir]

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don't know what to say. Encouraging your children to generalise like that about "crap parents in mcdonald's" and to assume that the children there are unhappy!!
...and "often in live in Leyton"! wtf?

Fine to criticise the behaviour, and mcdonald's itself, but to then generalise about people themselves not to mention a whole area of london....

Crap people/parents eat at Mcds do they? Dog owning smokers who live in Leyton? Nice tolerant attitude you're imparting to your children I see.

DC I am gobsmacked by your comments. I have no intention of taking my children to McD and will probably tell them that the food there is not nice, but not that the people who eat there are not! I think you shuld think v carefully about the messages youa re giving to your kids!

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I WELL recommend it We stopped watching Tv last year when ours broke in march. someone gave us one a couple of months later but we benefited so much from the TV less time we cancelled our licence and disconnected the aerial agian letters from the TV licence co. but its sorted and we just watch dvd on it sometimes inc dd1. One a day if she wants too. We play a lot of board games, have people round, read and decorate(!) it's great. TV has soooo much mind numbing rubbish on it and the soaps are sooo depressing it's bound to influence your mind, I'm glad I dont have that tempatation around any more.

(Why is it the DH is usually the one to opt for the vidoe/tv when looking after the kids!!)

HIGHLY RECOMMEND DITCHING YOUR LICENCE AND CHOPPING YOUR AERIEL. You get lots more done and appreciate getting a dvd a lot more.

DC - my 3 ds's will never eat at McD'd, not with my knowledge anyway, but my 6yo dss, who lives elsewhere, likes it and asks for it all the time. i cant control what he thinks/knows about the world as he doesnt live with me, so no matter what i say, i am denying him a pleasure if i say no, which i do anyway.
and my (younger) ds's think the sun shines out of his butt, so if he likes it, theyre damn sure to ask, nay demand, it pretty soon too. i'm happy for you that your method of convincing your kids its crap food works for you, but your smugness may bite you in the butt when they start to have influences on them other than yourself (peer pressure can be pretty strong!)

SORRY for going on about McD's again!

back to the telly then...

my remote control is suddenly not working & I am beside myself!! It means I can't watch dvds and can't watch tv via the digibox (so, crap reception) - these days i only watch dvds anyway! I have been falling asleep this week in front of Firefly and i've no idea what to do with myself tonight!
hats off to those of you who can do it even though i disagree that it is completely a good thing to do!

I've just left fulltime work after having a role reversal with my DP. Now with the house and everything with it back under my wing and also working from home, I find I need to take at least an hour or two of my day out to concentrate on work/dinner etc..

We have found that our DD has taken a bizarre love to the Wizard of Oz. CBeebies, Fimbles etc... just dont seem to interest her in the least. Although I am able to get her to participate in helping mummy she has a fond attraction to the munchkins and I tend to find both herself and I prancing around the living room to Dorothy and co.

In response to Dominiconnor's post, I'm going to burst the bubble and say I am a crap parent who smokes, and treats my DD to McD's once a month for breakfast and dare I say it .. I dont live in Leyton. God forbid making derogatory and condescending remarks about people you know nothing about ... now THAT should be illegal!!!

Just asked ds's "shall we get rid of the Telly",they all looked at me in horror!! Do agree that it is used as a babysitter,which is really easy to do. Must admit i can't stand most of the stuff they watch and am starting to select what they watch. I started muting the sound a while ago when the adverts are on as i hated them being brainwashed by them especially at xmas!!!!. I do watch in the evenings, but could quite easily do without it,DH would need a bit more convincing!(Telly addict).Don't miss it at all when we're on Hols.

I spent the last 2 yrs without a tv and it was fantastic. My son is 2 1/2 and I had been thinking about going tv-less when he was born, then just as I was weighing it up new research came out of the States which linked tv watching to hyperactivity/behavioural problems in kids. I'm not very good at explaining it but, essentially, very young children cannot reconcile the 'speed' of life and events they see on tv with the slower pace of real life, which causes problems. The results of this particular research suggested that kids up to 2 yrs should not watch any tv at all, then after that it should only be allowed in a very minimal, controlled fashion, growing in small increments as the children age.

My son is not really interested in the tv at all. He can't sit through an episode of Tweenies and if he sees me turn a tv on he will say 'No' and try to turn it off. This is because he has had so much one-on-one attention with reading, singing etc while we were tv-less. Ironically our HV thinks he has a speech delay and he is being referred for an assessment; so many people have suggested it might be our lack of tv that contributed, or that getting a tv might somehow work as therapy.

We have just moved to rented accomodation and there is a tv already here. I can't get rid of it as the house is managed by a property company and the landlord is not around, so I am being forced to buy a TV licence! However I've only had it on for a couple of things so far, and mostly been disgusted by the crap that's on, and turned it off again pretty quick.

I have always thought however that I would end up getting a tv again, as soon as ds asked for one I would have got one, kids have enough to cope with in the playground without being shut out of group discussions because they haven't seen the latest episode of Mutant Power Dinobots or whatever. It's just happened quicker than I'd planned.

Anyway I'm rambling but if you are at all tempted to go tv less then go for it, it takes a few days getting used to ( a house newly tv-less does feel very quiet) and you will miss your regular progs, but it's worth it! And you save £126.50 per year!

i didn't know about this research until recently. Now we have no tv on in the day [except the odd episode of balamory] and i think 17 month ds may be less hyper as a result, altho don't know if it can really work that quickly. Problem is the evenings, when dh wants to watch telly and ds watches it with him - makes it much harder to get him to bed. i think i would have a fight on my hands to get rid of the tV completely - would quite like to tho.

Shortly after DD was born we put our living room tv in the storage shed because I was so disgusted that a tiny baby was staring at the tv. I was also shocked at the violence and roughness in comparison to the gentleness of the baby. Hormones perhaps. DH went along with it but he wasn't really with me in spirit. We kept a small tv in our bedroom that we watch only after DD has gone to bed and some nights not at all.

DD is 19 months old now. I am very happy with things the way they are. DD is busy all day long doing all sorts of things without the tv. I get more done, DH is more communicative than he used to be.

I am amazed at how my friends have come to use the tv as a babysitter. One friend seems to use it more moderately and responsibly than the others.

Things may change when DD gets older. If she is interested in the tv we will either have to dump ours or put one in the living room. Whatever, I am proud that her early years are tv-less. I like thinking that her stimulation comes from real life.

Ds has only watched the Maori Wombles on the TV, all his other exposure to programmes has been on DVD, so no advertising, and you can turn off and programme as you wish.

He watched no TV before 1, around an hour a week 1-2 and around 2 hours a week maximum between 1-3 (years not the time).

I wouldn't get rid of the TV entirely - though I suppose I could as the DVDs would work in the computer.

I struggle with this issue.

DS1 has watched far to much TV in his 4 years, his dad is very slack and has introduced such classics as powerrangers, robot wars, zoids. DS1 has also just started at school and I am having real problems with his behaviour at home, he finds it difficult to concentrate, is aggressive, argumentative, difficult to manage.

A few months ago I banned all TV and the change was immediate - the relationship between him and his younger brother immediately improved.

Then I re-introduced it, no TV in the morning, no TV at night but TV in the afternoon after school for a hour or so. His father didn't help by letting him play on the computer.

Anyway, even though his TV viewing has been substantially curtailed to one hour, maybe two hours a day on a bad day TOPs - his behaviour as detoriated again. Its hard to judge whether it is the TV or just being exhausted by school and all the demands of it, especially as he is the youngest in the year.

Someone mentioned AHHD and I would be interested in the symptoms as I am starting to worry about DS1.

Hi souvenir - I think a tv less world is worth experiencing!
We have a tv, video and dvd player but no aerial. Ds is 4 and watches about an hour a day of childrens videos (little kids stuff) and is fine with that. Dh and i watch maybe 2-3 hours a week - a film or dvd extras. Radio is a lifeline!

Good luck, stick at it!

i really am a crap mum tv is a babysitter i let dd have mcdonalds would never dream of getting rid of it as me and dp are both soap addicts and life without big brother would be unthinkable, often find i have days when cbeebies is on and dd is at nursery usually that happens when i cant find the remote control to change the channel.

bobbybobbobbingalong - Maori wombles!
Wow the wombles speaking maori - thats something i would never have imagined

Maori wombles rock - I suppose they have been translated into many languages. No subtitles though - so only for the hardcore womble watcher.

Confusing as all the names have been transliterated so Tomsk is Tomeki.

souvenir, How are you getting on without the goggle box. Or did you give in?

havent read all this as theres too much,but hey.
our telly comes and goes,basically its the simpsons,ray mears, top gear and the eodd dvd.kids used to watch some kids telly.then we put the telly away for 6 months,when we brought it back found the kids telly umbearable .luckily the kids did too,whats happend to nice kids programs??????

We are TV free in this household. Well- it isn't connected to a receiving aerial, and hasn't been since I was 8 mo pg. We do own one, as we have an extraordinary number of games consoles- Dh's and mine I stress- dd being 20 months. We watch DVDs occasionally, but I'd say neither of us miss it. We don't subscribe to the cult of 'celebrity' in this country (UK) so never watched much TV anyway (mostly CSI, Green Wing, and Newsnight Dh anyway).
I think we'll probably get it connected when she is about 4 or 5, as I don't want her to be stigmatised at school for not being 'up' on popular culture, though she shows little interest when we visit granny's and the TV is on.
Recent studies have shown TV watching in under 2s to be detrimental, and this includes DVDs computer use etc. So I feel we made the right decision. We don't let her see us play games for more than 5 mins per week (but she does love to watch Mario & Donkey Kong!).

We are the only TV -free family we know- all the other mums at post-natal and baby groups thought I was a freak for this, most could NOT understand how I coped, in terms of occupying her all day . These were without exception middle class, well-educated women, but all of them used the TV as a means of subdueing/occupying/entertaining their babies (this was before 12 months)

I will admit that dd never got up before 7am more than about 4 times in her whole life (after the initial feeding every 3 hours thing), so I do appreciate that I have not had to entertain a baby from 5:30 every morning. I did however bf her exclusively, and we didn't drop night feeds until around 11 months, so I wasn't getting any more sleep than them.

Dh and I do spend a fair amount of time on our computers/online but I read an awful lot of books too, always have had. Plus, we save 125pounds per year licence fees. We listen to the radio a lot (radio 4) and frequently had it on 24 hours a day when she was tiny, as I found it helped me to 'switch off' and go to sleep when I was worried about her (pfb LOL).

Why don't you have a trial period without it, or keep a family diary of what you watch for a week, including whether or not you thought you'd wasted the time spent watching a programme IYSWIM?

Blimey, I went on a bit there, didn't I? See that's what happens when you've nothing to distract you on TV!