Those of you without TV, come tell me how you do it

[ibroughtcake]

I would love to wean DD off, she is 2.4 and probably watches maybe 4 hrs on a bad day (if DS is feeding all day) on a good day maybe 1/2 hr which I am not really bothered about.

I am getting her christmas pressies and stocking fillers ready now with a view in mind to getting things that will replace the watching tv.

So what do your children do in the daytime, say when you first get up in the morning and you are getting breakfast ready what will they be doing? If you are feeding the baby and sitting on the sofa for the millionth time that day what would you do with DC? We do lots of book reading when I am feeding but if I am just sitting down for 2 mins she just wanders around looking bored. Then comes the enveitable emptying of the fridge or drawers

I don't think I can stand looking at the blank spaced out look on her face when she is watching tv for much longer.

Any tips appreciated!

Glad to hear it iboughtcake - we've had a pretty TV free week too (partly due to being out of the house 70% of the time though). Don't know if anyone mentioned the poissonrouge website yet, but there's HOURS of entertainment on there, and it's beautifully done.

My dp's brother and wife used to pretend it was on the blink all the time..... fooled them while they were young, then they never got into the bad habit (like my dd)

This probably isn't suitable for younger kids but what my mum did was to charge us money to watch television. We got an hour a week free of charge and after that it was a penny per half hour deducted from our pocket money (it was a long time ago, you might want to up the rates). We weren't totally banned from it so we could watch anything we really liked, but it did make us think about whether we really wanted to watch something or not and so we got into the habit of only putting the TV on for a specific purpose, which I think is the right way to go about it. Maybe you could alter this for a younger child - give them a purse or bag with, say, four tokens in it every week and let them swap each token for one programme. I don't know if that would work as my daughter is only 14 months old.

Food for thought, anyway, and interesting to hear how everyone else tackles this. At the moment, my daughter watches nothing most days but if she is a bit ill or fed up, she gets to watch Teletubbies (saved episodes on Sky box), and she often watches In The Night Garden while I am cooking. I don't let her have the TV on all the time, but wonder what it will be like for us when she can ask for it so it's great to hear about what other people do.