Ditching the tech tit

Gosh, the referrers needed livening up.

I have an uncomfortable relationship with technology (but you organize digital/digitized information!) when it come to Seamus. When he was an infant, I stopped watching the news because twenty minutes of the BBC wound him up and made the witching hour a lot more witchy. I’ve tried to use TV in a pinch when I had to pack up our old place for moving and I had no childcare, and rather than settling down, he got more and more wound. He can sit still for things now, but what I’ve discovered is instead of zoning him out, his energy merely tamps down to explode later. And let’s not discuss the mimicry of the characters he wants to watch. Curious George led to hours of non verbal whining and the “No Watching Characters That Speak Less Well Than You” rule that allowed us to pretty much sidestep Elmo. But the worst are the tantrums that take place when movie time/TV time ends. They are loud and screamy and last and last.

It’s just not worth it to me to let him watch more than a movie a week, the exceptions being car rides over two hours, air planes, and hospitals, for which we use an iPad. He seems to have a pretty good grasp of his friend’s media-based interests, he’s not missing out on anything as far as I can tell.

Now as some of you may recall, I had to spend a good deal of time with him indoors recently. During that time there was always a television on, I was constantly queasy and underslept since he slept with me and kicked all night long, so I used the iPad with more frequency.

And boy has that bitten me in the ass. He hasn’t been home a full week and it’s been nothing but tantrum after tantrum about movies, or RugRats episodes (including Angelica’s cry of “I WANT it NOW!”, which makes me think about egging the Nickelodeon offices). Trying to taper is not working, trying to reason with him is not working, and trying to get him to earn screen time with good behavior is not working. So we’re cutting him off.

Patrick said a week. I plan to stretch it as long as I can, because out of all the insane behavior he’s engaged in this summer, this is a trigger I can control. And right now he’s playing in his room and listening to music, so I’m hoping that this is a good start.