No screentime for Johnnie Rose and Miller Steven Etheridge
Actress Tammy Etheridge, 33, has shared on her blog that she and wife, singer Melissa Etheridge, 46, won’t let their twins Johnnie Rose and Miller Steven, 14 months, watch TV or deal with anything with a screen. She writes about their arrangement after seeing a mother at a mall who was asking her son why he spends so much time behind the computer and TV.
In accordance with our household theory, the babies have mostly wooden toys. Big Legos were introduced recently, but otherwise, they just play with things that are made…how to ‘splain…toys that are made of "nature."
They don’t watch screens (except that [Kansas City] Chiefs loyalty thing for 3 minutes), they only have dolls with only dots for eyes, and half-circles of yarn for mouths; they don’t watch TV, videos, DVDs, or anything with a screen; and they won’t for a long, long time. Perhaps next year they can watch the family movie that [Melissa] makes every year.
Oh, yeah. and everywhere I go, I am told the twins are the best behaved babies X person has ever been around. Or they are the calmest babies that Z person ever saw…
Tammy explains that she believes if a child is used to a lot of noise, he/she may have difficulties at school.
I think of it like this: if I fill my children’s senses on overload: TV for hours, or video games that mock behavior I don’t want the child displaying later (shooting people) … then it would only make sense that later, when my child is in school, the room will be deathly quiet, and only the teacher’s voice is filling my child’s world — a world that has gotten used to BANG! ZIP! MOVE OUTTA THE WAY! GET IT! GET IT! SHOOT IT BANG BANG ZIP ZAP — my child might feel ready to jump out of its skin due to such "unnaturally quiet" surroundings.
My child might be tempted to behave erratically to change the atmosphere in the class to match a more comfy atmosphere for himself/herself — something louder, more chaotic, and with more anxiety (am I gonna get my guy killed? how many guys do I have left? I need to shoot the bad guys before they shoot me!).
But doctors don’t talk about that either. So they’d probably call my child difficult, and diagnose it with ADD or ADHD, gimme drugs to pacify the damage being done by continuing to let him live in Screen World, and move on.
Source: Tammy Lynn’s blog
Thanks to CBB reader Lisa.
What are your thoughts on this matter? Do you agree that TV and computer games can damage a child?