If you’re new to this blog in the last day or two, you might want to start with the first installment of this 3-part series of posts. I started with The Media Dilemma, then followed that with media in the home being a Work in Progress for us.
I ended the last media-related post mentioning that Hubs and I had an eye-opening, or rather brain-opening evening hearing from Kim John Payne. I have not read Simplicity Parenting…yet. However, I have spent several years around a few parents who have either read the book or others like it and who are far more “unplugged” than even we are at this stage. The children from these families do not see screens in the home, at all. No computer access, no TV access, no phones or tablets for them to play on.
None of that really had a huge impact on me because parenting is a lot of “to each his own” unless you plan to “follow” a friend’s lead on every single decision. I admired them for their tenacity in keeping up the commitment, but that was about it.
Once I became more aware of what Sensory Processing Disorder really is and how my child struggles with it at some level is when I felt I should begin to think about that type of “home life” a little more seriously. I certainly could argue that screens, most especially the television screen, should be limited to young children if for no other reason than the commercials and the content of the various shows. Most of my mom-friends were in agreement about which cartoons were off-limits, for example.