• The AAP discourages media use for babies and kids under two
• Parents should avoid putting a TV in a child’s room
• There may be a negative effect of parents watching TV with kids around
• There needs to be additional research into long-term effects of TV viewing

I have written about my own misgivings about kids and TV. My kids don’t really watch TV all that much. The big one would prefer to read. The little one likes TV but would rather run around in circles. Literally. When they do watch it’s either Fresh Beat Band or Electric Company. The little one watches Sesame Street and Backyardigans. I have always been the “weird mom” because of this. I’ve had people ask me, with eyes bugging out, how I can keep my kids from watching television. (I’ve always wanted to say, “Easy, I don’t turn it on,” but I figured that’s sort of rude.)

This new policy gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, I won’t be seen as the weird mom anymore. The AAP has a lot of pull. While the last set of restrictions — which called for zero television use — came out there several years ago, these have more meat to them. More concrete guidelines that may be easier to follow. Is it wishful thinking to say that I’m sure it won’t be long before parents start cutting down television usage? Well, I do. I just wish the recommendations came out a few years ago. They would have saved me a lot of bug-eyed looks.

It’s so hard having a pulpit that can’t really be personalized. As a writer, I take a stance on something, and have to stand behind it. I can’t temper what I write for each person who reads it. Take my post on babies and toddlers and television viewing. Do I think babies should be watching TV? No, but I also don’t think that moms who do let their kids watch an episode or two of Sesame Street — or in this case Handy Manny — are bad moms. In fact, this mom and the others at the playdate are pretty wonderful. The one mom who posed the question is so devoted and so attentive. She is what I would classify as a Great Mom (notice the capital letters!). Still, as someone who has seen the research, and talked to the experts, I should be telling her what I know, right?

I’m not so sure. Research is great. It helps cure diseases, and helps us avoid harmful situations. However, the research subjects are human. They are exposed to thousands if not tens of thousands of other variables. So sure, television might cause children to have difficulty sleeping, and contribute to obesity, but maybe it has a different affect for a child who spends plenty of time running around, playing with other kids, and having his mom and dad read to him than the kid who doesn’t move from the set all day. Maybe the researchers are right, but only for specific types of kids. Maybe kids who watch a lot of TV are also eating poor food choices, and not getting any other exercise. Or maybe the kids who — like my friend’s son — only watch TV in the morning won’t have the same outcome as kids who spend hours and hours in front of the tube from morning until night. I don’t know. I do know that no parent should ever feel judged or bad about the choices they make for their kids as long as they are doing the absolute best that they can do. For me, that means no television until after the age of two. For my friends, it means an hour or so of television every day so they can get through the day. There is no right or wrong answer. There truly are shades of gray when it comes to this parenting thing.

Are you a blogger? How do you deal with keeping your blogging life and your personal life separate? Are you a reader? Have you ever felt uncomfortable or judged after reading someone’s blog?

Charlie Brown gets brow-beaten and screamed at. Do you want your kids watching that kind of garbage?

This morning I woke up and checked Facebook like I always do. My sister’s status update made me laugh:

“So, we watched Rudolph tonight and it was harsh! Santa made fun of Rudolph, and yelled at Rudolph’s dad for hiding the fact that he was a freak. Rudolph’s dad told his mom to stay home because it was a man’s job. Yukon Cornelius was packing heat. Hermey the elf was obviously gay, and kicked out of the elf club AND he pulled out all the Abomoinable Snowman’s teeth to save his friends. All the toys that were different were sent to the Island of Misfits. Way to teach kids tolerance!”

I smiled and laughed, but realized my sister was right. There is no way that original storyboard would have made it past today’s network execs. In fact, very few of the Christmas specials would have made the cut. Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town? The Burgermeister guy was mean! A baby is left sitting on a doorstep, and shuttled off to the orphan asylum except the wind takes him! Kids forced into hard labor! No toys! Then Kris sneaks into people’s homes. Really? How frightening! And most of the characters end up in a dungeon!

We watched the Grinch last night. (TiVo is a wonderful thing when your kids go to sleep at 7.) I was scared of his red eyes. And the fact that he was pantless, and breaking into people’s homes. I spent the entire time making fun of it to my husband. (Quietly, of course.) We both cracked up when the narrator said the Grinch “whizzed down the mountain with his load.”

Frosty the Snowman is equally as scary. Kids who run away. Frosty worries that Karen, the heroine, is going to die of the cold. She looks like she’s going to, too. The mean magician locks them both in the greenhouse and Frosty does die. And A Charlie Brown Christmas? None of those Charlie Brown cartoons are “appropriate” by today’s standards. The kids want money and real estate for Christmas. (Remember that line? “Just send money. Particularly tens and 20s.”) And the screaming and calling of names! Just terrible! But the most egregious part is probably the fact that they tell the Christmas story. The actual one. Religion and television don’t mix today unless you’re talking about FoxNews. (J/K)

I’m really glad I get to watch these shows with my daughter. She was so cute last night, noticing something I didn’t: “Wow, that Grinch is not nice to his dog,” she told us. She was right. She’s never seen a character whip an animal before. It was a good way to discuss animal violence, and how we want her to act. Still, I am the same person who commented on a friend’s very long Facebook thread about the appropriateness of having 5- and 6-year-old children at an adult’s movie. (The movie in question was 2012) I am against it. I don’t think children should ever be exposed to true violence before the age of 13. The experts agree or they wouldn’t have created the PG-13 rating.

Back to my very un-PC Christmas specials. I think it’s rather funny that, if the above movies were up for consideration today, they would probably need many changes to get past the network censors. And parents would applaud them. And yet the majority of Americans wouldn’t think twice about letting their kids see an obviously adult movie. We, as a society, are raising kids who aren’t allowed to lose, are coddled and cushioned, and yet are given free reign to see the most egregious violence out there. It’s a scary world, readers. And not just because there’s a guy on my TV trying to kill a snowman.

Did you love the Christmas specials as a child? Which was your favorite? What do you think about them today? Do you let your kids watch TV specials? How about PG or PG-13 movies? Tell us your story.

Next thing you're going to tell me is that Corn Flakes eliminate the need for hand sanitizers.

I’ve been talking to Katelyn about marketing since she was barely able to talk. She’d be sitting there, all cozy in her cart cover, asking for all the colorful, fun-looking products. The ones with characters on the labels, and bright, garish labels. I’d explain how smart the marketers were; how well they had done their jobs. The marketers want kids to want their so-called kid-friendly wares, so they make packaging and in-store signage as loud and appealing as possible. Then I’d go one step further, pulling out those boxes and tubs of yogurt and cereal and bars and reading the labels to Katelyn. “Does that sound like food,” I’d always ask, making it a game. “Nooooo,” she’d say, and we’d laugh together. Then we’d pick up one of our favorite brands and read the label. Low sugar content. No chemicals. No artificial colors or flavors. No junk. Since she didn’t watch TV, she didn’t have that siren song of ads in her head, so I was able to steer her towards better fare such as Kashi’s Mighty Bites, Barbara’s Best Puffins, or Trader Joe’s Os.

I am especially sensitive to marketing practices because I’ve written about them for more than a decade. I get what sells. So do the manufacturers, according to a new 102-page report from Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.

It was covered last week in the mainstream media, but the stories didn’t really do the extensive report the justice it deserves. I won’t lie. I actually skipped some of the pages, too. But when I saw another sort-of-related story in USA Today that reports how Kellogg’s added the word, “IMMUNITY” in great big letters on boxes of Cocoa Krispies, I had to take a go at this.

First, let’s look at the original report out of the Rudd Center. Basically, researchers found that the most heavily promoted brands — on TV, on social media sites, and in stores — are generally the worst for children. Kids who buy these bad choices are also the ones eating the most cereal. Sometimes, up to twice as much as a kid eating something healthier that’s got less advertising behind it.

Those super-sugary brands are spending big bucks for those results, according to the report. “The average 2- to 5-year-old also viewed over 500 television ads for child cereals in 2008, 89% of them for General Mills and Kellogg products.” Sigh. I won’t even comment. I’ll let the study authors do it for me: “In spite of their pledges to reduce unhealthy marketing to children, the large cereal companies continue to target children with their least healthy products. Child cereals contain 85% more sugar, 65% less fiber and 60% more sodium when compared to adult cereals. In fact, not one cereal that is marketed directly to children in the United States would be allowed to advertise to children on television in the United Kingdom.”

I think this proves that I was right when I told my daughter, way back when, that the food manufacturers don’t care about our health. All they care about is making money. Getting kids hooked, and keeping them hooked. Today’s news just solidifies this. Kellogg’s is marketing to parents, getting them to think that by buying Cocoa Krispies they are going to help their kids avoid N1H1. It’s sick, actually, this idea to prey on people’s fears to sell a product. But fear, like sex and wacky cartoon characters, sell. I’m hoping now, that more parents are aware of what’s going on, they will let their money doing the talking and stop buying cereals that are making our kids unhealthy and fat.

Want to see how your favorite cereal stacks up? Check out pages 65 and 66 of the Rudd Center report, or search for your cereal or manufacturer on the organization’s tool for consumers.

What kind of cereal did you eat as a child? What do your own kids eat today? Will your purchase decisions change after reading the report? Talk back and let us know.

The ultimate babysitter. Or is it?

When Big Girl was born, I got a few Baby Einstein DVDs as gifts. I looked at them. They looked cute, and were supposed to be good for her, so I popped them into the DVD player. She was about six-months-old at the time. She was instantly mesmerized. Beautiful artwork (Baby Van Gogh), funky puppets (Baby Mozart), adorable animals (Baby Animals) — what’s not to love? But then I started reading the research. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) had already come out against letting kids younger than two watch any TV. Then stories started turning up in mainstream publications such as Time Magazine and Newsweek.

Movies were supposed to be making babies smarter, according to those who were developing and releasing them, but scientists figured out that they actually might cause more harm than good. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard Children’s Hospital found that kids who watched TV spent less time interacting with families or playing creatively. Television viewing can increase a child’s risk of obesity, and decrease the number of words they hear spoken by adults around them. A 25-year-long study published in Acta Paediatrica found that “if children under 12 months watched TV for more than two hours a day they were six times more likely to have delayed language skills.” Another study found that children who watched baby DVDs between seven and 16 months knew fewer words than children who did not. Even having the TV on in the background could hurt babies, says a University of Massachusetts study, which found that kids played less when a TV was on in the house. One study even suggested that television viewing could contribute to kids getting ADHD.

After reading and hearing all of this, I put my foot down. No more TV for Big Girl. My husband reluctantly agreed once he read all the literature. We stuck with it, too, although most people thought we were nuts when we brought it up. It wasn’t all that difficult. Big Girl went to bed early, and had a working mommy. If she was with a sitter, she wasn’t going to be parked in front of a TV. If she was with me, I was dealing with mommy guilt for leaving her with that sitter so we were out doing things. Or we were at a playdate. This is why we managed to avoid TV until she was almost three. Today she’s limited to about 30 minutes of tube time per day — an hour on the weekends — and there are some days she doesn’t watch TV at all because she has homework or she’s reading or we’re running around outside. When she does watch, though, at this point I know she’s getting real benefits from her viewing. We watch educational stuff. She loves the Magic School Bus, for example. (Hey, I’m not anti-TV! I know there’s some good stuff out there!) Still, Little Girl, my second daughter, is TV-free, and will hopefully remain that way for a while.

My kids are definitely in the minority, though. About 90 percent of kids under two watch TV, while 40 percent of infants under three-months-old are staring at the screen. Research has found that parents don’t realize that the APA cautions against any TV time for infants and toddlers. In fact, some parents — like I did — think that TV is giving their kids an edge. Disney, however, knows better thanks to the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC). The CCFC in 2006 lodged a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaint against Disney, which owns the Baby Einstein franchise, asking The Mouse to stop claiming their videos were beneficial for infants. The FTC never got a chance to rule on it because Disney proactively said it would “take appropriate steps to ensure that any future advertising claims of educational and/or developmental benefit for children are adequately substantiated.” And that’s what they did. They stopped saying the videos provide educational benefits. Last month, the fine folks at Disney started putting their money where their mouth is, offering anyone who purchased a Baby Einstein video between June 5, 2004 and September 4, 2009 a refund for up to four movies. Parents can also exchange the videos for books or music CDs. All they have to do is download a form, and send it and the movies back to the company.

So what’s the point? I don’t think a little TV is going to kill anyone or make them become an sociopath. (There’s research that links TV to increased violence, too.) However, I think a lot of us use TV as a babysitter. Raising kids is hard work, and sometimes you just need a break. TV, as I found out early on, is mesmerizing. It gives you a few minutes to sit down, relax, and not worry about keeping a kid entertained. I know I’ve had my daughter watch a video while the baby was napping and I was doing an interview. But I also know how guilty I felt doing it. I think it’s a very tough question, and one that’s not black or white. What’s your take on TV and kids? Will you be asking for your Baby Einstein refund? How do you select the right shows for your family? Please comment and let me know.