This past weekend, during our campus clean up, I shared tha twhen my children were very small, my husband and I made the monumental decision to get rid of our television. My son was about to enter kindergarten and we wanted our two children to be immersed in books. I do not mean to suggest they were ‘screen free’ during their childhood. There were friends and relatives who provided plenty of time for them to catch up on Power Rangers and My Little Pony, or whatever was in vogue at the time. Both grew up rather unscathed, were not social pariahs, and are, to this day, avid readers. For all intents and purposes, our experiment was a success.
Please, do not think I was some role-model parent. There was and is nothing like a moment to collect oneself after a hard day, and engaging with a child was and is daunting. I understand the ongoing demands that children put upon caregivers. My children managed to get lost in a book, giving me a moment’s respite. However, my experiment was before screens became phones, computers and iPads. Would my experiment work today? Hard to know, but I imagine it would be exponentially more challenging.
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