With your first born child, it’s pretty easy to control his diet of everything—sugar, television, war toys, choice of friends—for the first few years anyway. But then he hits school age, somewhere after five years old, kindergarten age, and the once controlling parent begins to question some of her controls.  My child is the only one who doesn’t…and now you fill in the blank.

Most parents know that they are fighting a losing battle if they are too orthodox about their restrictions.  Never allow your child sugar, and he will begin to crave it or sneak it. Never allow your child even to pretend that his Tinker Toy is a gun, and everything will become a gun (including graham crackers chewed into just the right shape!).

 But what happens when allowing your child to do the very thing you have restricted compromises your values?  Video games are a case in point.  There are parents, many in my practice, who have done a yeoman’s job of keeping screen time out of their children’s growing years, knowing that children thrive on interactive, creative play and social activities. Now they are faced with their child being “the only one of his friends who doesn’t have video games.”  This is a real tough one.  I assure you that there is no perfect, one-size-fits-all answer to this dilemma.

 If you are a parent who has managed to keep X Box, DS, Wii and the like out of your child’s life, I applaud you!  There is absolutely no reason that is good enough to have such entertainment in your child’s life before he is elementary school age. That said, I am not sure how long it will last or should last. A big part of growing up and developing social intelligence has to do with fitting in, speaking the language of peers. For most kids that is somewhere around 7 or 8 years old.

 When my children were in 4^th or 5^th grade, and I had successfully kept network television out of their lives, they complained that they were the only ones on the lunch benches who didn’t watch The Cosby Show. They felt out-of-it and couldn’t participate in the Friday reviews of the Thursday night show. “Well,” I said, “then let’s figure out how to make this work for you.”  And after homework and chores, Bill Cosby and his television family became part of our family once a week.

 Deciding if you should let video games into your child’s life (and yours by extension) has to do with several things, specific questions you need to consider about your child and yourself.

 About your child:

•  Is he able to entertain himself?
• Does he get his homework and chores done without much urging?
• Is he able to follow family rules?
• Does he try to negotiate his way out of limits?
• Does he tend to become an addict?
• What will not having video games mean for him?

 About you:

• Are you able to set parameters and limits around various privileges?
• Are you able to withstand your child’s budding debate and negotiation skills?
• Can you tolerate his complaining and whining?
• Can you create reasonable, appropriate, and therefore effective consequences?
• Are you able to follow through on those consequences for limit infractions?
• Do you know why video games are an issue for you?
• Is this really about your child, or is it about you?

  You need to consider carefully what having and not having video games in your child’s life will mean for your child and for your whole family.

 I believe in most things in moderation.  When the time comes to introduce into your child’s life something that has previously been withheld, think about taking very, very small bites. It is kind of like introducing new foods to an infant. Then watch how your child handles it, how it affects him and the family.  If the use or non-use takes over his life and yours, then likely your child is not ready.  Modulating is a skill that grows over time.

 There is one bit of reassurance I will share. Your children will pick up your true values and beliefs regardless of the extent to which you allow things such as TV, video games, war toys into his life.  Your child watches you, notices your facial expressions, hears you talk to others. Your messages are being transmitted and received all the time. Your discussions around the dinner table, in the car, at tuck time communicate your values, and your child is taking it in. He may not be able to agree with you; his is job is to fight you like the dickens, as he becomes an individual. But he gets it.   You may not see the result now, but when he is a father, you will see it and smile!

It seems like there is something for everyone in this Winter Olympics, and it’s easy to become an addict. The entire event is packed with heart-racing excitement as well as examples of natural talent, acquired skill, and athleticism.  Don’t you just sit on the edge of your chair?

But there is more.  While I am a believer in limited screen time for children, especially commercial television, the Olympics are providing our children (and us) with important lessons and messages that are hard to find in daily life, making the screen time well worth it.  In fact, I think the Olympics give new meaning to the show title American Idol.

Did you watch Lindsay Vonn’s Gold Medal run in the Women’s Down Hill?  My heart raced right along with her skis.  Her elation upon winning was contagious.  And her cathartic tears as she described the extreme effort she put forth, the result of which was achieving her goal and her dream, told the tale. 

The same held true for Shaun White, the Red Tomato, and watching him was better than Cirque du Soleil!  A fellow snow boarder described the amount of effort and time he put into his perfecting his tricks and style, “We didn’t see him for a year.”

The athletes of the Olympics are providing just the kinds of heroes we want our kids to have: people who dream big, who set goals, who have passion and devotion, who take risks, who work incredibly hard, who sacrifice who give their all. 

Even though most of the events of the Olympics are individual, each athlete is part of a team, either a specific event team or the country team.  Watching each participant cheer for his team mates, sharing the successes and the disappointments, is a magnificent demonstration of empathy and team loyalty.  Sometimes you lose, but you really can be  thrilled that your teammate has won at the same time.

Some of the athletes reached the moon; but most did not. And that is an equally, if not more important message. You can set you sights high, you can give your very best effort and still not win the medal.  How often do our children get to see failure (of sorts), disappointment, modeled?  Not very often.   The athletes of the Olympics are models of sportsmanship. No tantrums and running away for them!  And the best part?  Those same skiers get up the next day, snap on their skis and try again…and again and again.

 If you haven’t shared the lessons of the Olympics, you still have a chance. Take the time to introduce your children to some real idols, American and all the others.

I heard a radio advertisement this week for a DVD , Your Baby Can Read, or some name like that.  Needless to say, it grabbed my attention.  This program promises to teach your toddler, even infant, to read.  A mother of a three year old claimed that she had been using it for a year, and now her child was reading on a third grade level.  Please save me from being sick!  It took everything in my body not to drive off the road…as I seethed.

 Why on earth does anyone want her toddler (or infant) to read?

 Then I saw in the newspaper today that Docia Zavitkovsky had died.  Docia, a matriarch in our field, dedicated her entire 96 year life to young children, to raising consciousness about the importance of our children’s early years as the foundation for a rich and satisfying life. She was the founding mother of Play Matters, a nonprofit organization that places play at the heart of early childhood. What would Docia have said about this advertisement? I shudder to think.

 I am not sure which part of the radio advertisement bothers me the most…that parents are pushing their children in the exact wrong direction? That parents are so competitive in today’s world that they are taking desperate measures to give their children a perceived advantage that can actually be a disadvantage?  That merchants and advertisers are taking advantage of naive parents, making money off of them? It all bothers me.

It reminds me of Baby Einstein. The inventor made a fortune off of all those parents who were convinced that pouring images into their infants and toddlers via a screen would actually make them smart. Have you all thrown out those DVD’s yet…or better, asked for a refund?

 How do you grow a child?  Our very youngest children are nourished by interacting with people and with their environment. They learn and grow by feeding the right hemisphere of their brains with sensory and emotional and social experiences, through interacting with all that they encounter in their world. Learning in the early months and years of life is about play, exploration, trial and error.  It is priming the pump, laying the foundation for learning to read and other left brain experiences at the right time, and that is much later. How interesting it is that you can teach a toddler to recognize a word by repeated (boring) exposures to that word, over and over and over. But show him that word when he is six years old, and he’ll have in a minute or two.  And to top it off, he’ll even know what the word means!

 Would it be too evil of me to cross my fingers that Baby Can Read is a total flop? I pray, for Docia’s sake, that not one more DVD is sold.

Would you allow your child to eat and eat and eat, whatever and whenever he wanted?  Of course not.  It’s not much different with a child’s media intake.  Just like a parent implements portion and quality control with food, so must he implement the same controls with media.

 It is a child’s rightful job to try to get the very most of whatever he likes the most, be it candy, television, computer time.  It takes many years for a child to develop the ability to see the big picture, thinking about why something might not be so good for him in the long run and applying that knowledge to his choices and behaviors. (And that ability, controlled by the prefrontal cortex of the brain, is not fully developed until a person is in his early twenties.) Therefore, your child needs you to put the brakes on for him.

 Let me give you some real ammo for implementing a balanced diet.   Normal child development can actually be side tracked by too much media input (television, computer, DS, Xbox, Wii, etc…) Children’s brains are “in process.” They are constantly wiring and rewiring themselves. And they do so based on the experiences they are having. You know the old expression, “Use it or lose it?” Well, it’s true here, too.  If certain skills are not used, the brain will rewire itself to use the ones that are being practiced.  Children’s real life skills, the ones they need for functioning in the context of life—social interactions, problem solving, conflict resolution, compromise, reading emotion, etc..—can get rusty.  The neural pathways that have been well carved enabling these skills are plowed over, and the new skills developed for media intake take over.  The brains of young children are naturally wired for intimacy and socialization, for handling emotions, for interacting with people. That’s not something that should be side tracked. If fact, children need more experience with these, not less.

 In this day of wanting to give your child every advantage, when a parent feels she may be depriving her child of something alllll the other kids have, it’s tough to limit media intake.  Children should certainly not be deprived of all that media. It is here to stay, and our children need to become media literate. It will be part of their lives.  The key, however, is the implementation of reasonable limits.

 Just because your child is pining for a Wii doesn’t mean he must have one. And just because he has one, doesn’t mean he should be able to use it at will.  Before you say Absolutely not! Or Whatever you want! take the time to open the lines of communication. Listen to what your child wants, and share what you think is right for him. Create a win-win situation. Think about compromise. Set up a trial period, and be prepared to check in and see how it is going for both of you. This will be a great lesson in compromise and problem solving for you both, as well as strengthen you trusting relationship.

 There are two caveats to keep in mind: 

 It is okay to say No!  Children should not have everything they want. Learning to tolerate disappointment is a crucial life skill.

 It is okay to have a goal. Longing is a potent motivator. Don’t deprive your child of the experience of longing for something, working to get it, and basking in his achievement of his own making.

 Sometimes by taking away from the child, we are actually giving to him…just what he needs.

The topic for my first blog on my new website had been on my mind when I paid a visit to my cousin Sarah and her boys, ages 5 and 7.  After spending the afternoon with them, I knew I had found my topic.

Sarah lives in a TV free house. (Okay, her husband, also a professor like Sarah, wrote a book about the effects of television viewing on children and how to make it work for your family.) But here’s the thing of it, those little boys don’t miss it, and they don’t ask for it.  What was more remarkable to me was how  well the boys are able to entertain themselves. The whole time I was there, they were busy in their playroom. Yes, there was a small episode of tattling and maybe even an agument or two. But neither Sarah nor Fred got involved, and whatever it was passed quickly. The boys really played together. No computer, no TV, no Wii…just plain, old fashioned play.

I am sure there are days when Sarah would love to have an electronic babysitter, but that isn’t an option in their house.  They have learned to play together becuase that’s how they entertain themselves.   Do you think TV is robbing some children of the chance to learn to get along?