Turning Off TV

TerryS · Joined: 16 Oct 2006 Posts: 95 Location: California

Lisa of "The Toby show" wrote a very heartening
piece about being inspired (partly by Unplug Your
Kids and tvSmarter!) to cut back on her son's
TV watching.

http://thetobyshow.typepad.com/the_toby_show/2008/03/the-tv-trap.html

She writes about having the best of intentions to
keep TV to a minimum, but how easy it is for it to
creep up to higher levels. Educational and "age-appropriate"
videos can seem so benign and innocuous that watching
more is completely easy (like falling off a log).

I haven't gotten very much feedback on tvSmarter,
so it is very encouraging to know that it helped
*change* someone's life (at least a little bit).

When I check my tvsmarter.com stats and see that
someone has spent a fair amount of time checking
out the pages, especially the "children", "school",
"reading", and "aggression" pages, it's nice to
think that some little kid is about to get his/her
TV privileges severely curtailed!

lpowers · Joined: 04 Feb 2008 Posts: 4 Location: Riverside, CA

Regarding TVSmarter: Regarding the comic books: One thing that is just absolutely astonishing to me is that comic books are extinct!!!!! Just try to find one for sale at the drugstore or wherever! When I was a kid, I just about lived on comic books. This was about my 2nd and 3rd grade era. The best were Scrooge McDuck. I've always figured that, for quite young kids, it doesn't matter what they read as long as they read *something*.

And, maybe someday on TVSmarter or somewhere, it might be interesting to see an article on Morris Berman's "enchantment" versus TV. Hard as heck to get a subject like that even by the toe, but I feel there is something very important in there somewhere. It's just so darned elusive.

Lester