Terrible TV

My little girl is in love with the tv. Does that say something about me as a mom? As I'm sitting here writing this she is watching the last 45 minutes of The Incredibles. Now she doesn't watch tv all day every day. But when I'm making dinner, or need to take a shower, or just at night when she is exhausted and it's too early to go to bed yet. I know that there are a lot of people who believe that you shouldn't let your child watch more than an hour of tv a day.

I don't know. I don't think you should just plop your child in front of the tv every minute of the day . . . but once and awhile so that I can get something done is really nice. Googie probably ends up watching one whole movie a day. Is this going to affect her for life? I don't think so. She needs entertainment, and if once a day it's from a movie, it's not going to kill her.

So where is the danger in letting them watch tv? Does it really hurt your eyesight? How much do you have to watch for any negative affects? Is it just because as a mom your not giving her your full attention? What if it's educational does that excuse it? I don't know. Does it have more to do with her activity level than with how much she watches?

Just something to think about. We do so many things because its the right thing to do, but do we really know why we do them? Like eat a small meal in the morning and a big meal at night. That one really just doesn't make sense, I need all the energy I can get in the morning to start my day with, but society tells us the big meal is at night not in the morning. Do we just go through life doing what were supposed to? We need to ask why. Even if in the end we end up doing it anyways, we should know why.

I heard a story (I think on a sitcom a while ago . . .) about a new mother who was making a pot roast for the first time and she called her mom and asked how to do it. Her mother told her to cut off the end of the potroast. The daugther asked why and the mom said "I don't know, that's just the way your grandmother did it." So the daughter called the grandmother, and asked about cutting off the end of the roast. The grandmother said "well that's the way my mother did it." So the daughter called her great-grandmother and she said "well I always cut off the end my pot roasts because my pan is too small." So three generations threw away the end of their roasts because the great-grandmother's pan was too small. No one even questioned why. We need to be careful not to do the same things in our own lives. Even if it comes back and we end up doing it the way generations have, at least we know why.