I don’t let my son watch much TV. Occasionally, I turn on PBS Kids if I need to get dinner in the oven without him hanging on my leg, or let him watch a Sesame Street video on my laptop if the two of us need a break. But that’s about it. So on a recent flight back home from Florida, watching the Cartoon Network (even without the sound on) on the mini TV in front of him was the most screen time my one-and-a-half-year-old has ever had.
He was pretty mesmerized by the scene in front of him–a cat was chasing a mouse–and I was happy to have him calm and quiet. It all seemed innocent until I turned away for a minute, then looked back to see him staring at a screen full of explosions followed by the image of a mechanical chopping block threatening to dice up the main characters. For some reason, I naively assumed all kiddie cartoons were benign, and forgot about the fact that some of them can be pretty violent. During a time when my son considers everything on TV to be real, a death scene featuring his favorite animals is not something I’m ready for him to see.
I quickly changed the channel (to Animal Planet, where an abused dog was recovering from a bloody wound) before I finally managed to turn the TV off entirely. But the whole experience was a reminder of how careful I want to be about blindly letting my son watch TV–or even casually be around it. Just the other weekend when my husband was watching a football game and my son and I played on the floor nearby, a trailer for a horror movie came on that I’m thankful he did not look up and see. What would he have made of the scene before him?
Maybe when he is older and understands what’s real and what isn’t–or I can at least explain to him what he’s seeing–witnessing little snippets of TV programming like this won’t seem like such a big deal. But for now, when he mimics everything he sees and doesn’t understand the concept of “pretend,” TV can seem like a pretty scary thing. And while for the most part I can control what he sees, there are times when I obviously don’t think to. So for now I think I’ll simply keep the TV turned off when he’s around. Except for a little Elmo here and there…The fuzzy little red guy can’t be bad, right?
