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I know that sometimes kids have really negative reactions to sitting and
watching tv a lot. Some kids really seem to be just hooked and unable to tear
themselves away and when they finally do they seem to have an altered mood
that is not pleasant at all. I have friends whose kids reacted this way and
one of my kids went through a period of time like this.

It got me thinking harder about how it worked for us when my kids were
younger. We unschooling parents who say we give unlimited choice to our kids
may be really engaging in "manipulating" the situation more than we realize
or admit. When one of my kids went through a phase where watching too much tv
made her really really cranky for the rest of the day, I didn't respond by
setting limits on tv watching - but, in fact, in a way, I did.

I would notice to myself, "Hey, Roxana is watching tv," and I'd be
automatically thinking of something I could entice her away with as soon as
that particular show ended. Sometimes I didn't - and then, later after she'd
recovered and gotten her normal self back -- I'd find some way to at least
casually mention that that kind of meltdown often happened after extensive tv
watching. Then - sometimes when I would entice her away - later, when we were
cooking or washing the dog or doing something else "fun" <G> -- I'd say,
"Today when you only watched one show, you didn't have that meltdown feeling,
huh?"

She slowly learned to sense when it was too much for her. Too much computer
time had a similar effect -- but she knows how to handle both tv and computer
time now.

So - it isn't like we ignored it when TV seemed to be having such a
deleterious effect on one child's mood and behavior that it was impacting the
whole family. It was that our response to it wasn't to just set some
arbitrary limit -- there was no specific limit and there was much more
involved in our response than just limiting tv to avoid the problems. It
didn't last that long - although it lasted longer with the computer time
issue - and she's had to experiment with that a lot. She spends a LOT of time
on the computer - and I think the way she's worked it out is by the
combination of different activities she does on there - not just doing one
thing for hours and hours. In this caes, I don't see how she'd have ever
worked this out for herself if we'd just arbitrarily said, "One and one-half
hours a day is your limit." And I'd have never been able to solve the
computer problems for her - it HAD to be her own trial and error solution in
order to work for her.

--pam