Lately it seems that the most common theme in parenting “how-to” guides is the “how to limit your children’s media time” theme. (By “media” I am assuming they are referring to TV, computers and video games, although for all I know they could be referring to time spent reading People magazine or camping out six weeks early in order to be the first in line at the next Star Wars installment; both of these are habits that even without the prompting of a parenting expert I would discourage in my children–a child who can rattle off Clay Aiken’s astrological sign and/or quote George Lucas’ dialogue verbatim can only be headed down the dreaded path of theater major).
But assuming, for the time being, that these experts are referring not to the sort of habits that lead to knowing all the words to Broadway musicals and/or dressing in nothing but black, but rather to the more innocuous sort of habits that lead to mirthful glee at the prospect of an opponent’s decapitation, every parenting guide seems to be stuck in the rut of only offering new ideas for how parents can keep track of the time: some call for egg timers and hour glasses, and some suggest having your children “buy” their media time with an equal amount of reading time, but none of them, to my great surprise, offer up what surely must be the easiest solution of all: owning crappy stuff. This method (which, yes, I invented myself), is not only inexpensive and highly effective, but also offers something that no other child-rearing book seems to find necessary: it can be carried out by parents in it’s entirety without them ever once having to get up off of the couch.
Here’s how it works: if you are worried that your kids are watching too much television, simply cling desperately to an outdated 10-year-old TV set that renders all of their favorite actors’ skin tones into colors somewhere between Oompa-Loompa orange and violently seasick green. Better yet, refuse to pay for cable, so that the only channels that come in clearly are the ones showing nothing but claymation Bible stories and Spanish telenovelas.
The same method works for computer time as well. If you are worried that your kids are spending too much time online, then try owning a computer so slow that the time bar for how much longer a program needs to load includes geologic time periods. For extra protection, make sure the mouse is really old and cranky, and that the computer routinely crashes during the “good part” of anything.
Video games are trickier, since it seems that some children will happily play the dullest, most meaningless game for hours on end; it’s hard to imagine that the same child who can gaze intently at a hand-held soccer game could ever be bored into picking up a good book, but trust me: it’s possible. Remember “Pong”, the video game version of table tennis where two blips of light bat another blip back and forth across the screen with all the finesse and speed of a tugboat pushing a barge into place on the Mississippi? Even the most devoted gamer would find it hard to fight against the soporific effects of a level one game of “Pong”.
As a matter of fact, I can still remember receiving “Pong” myself one Christmas when I was nine and had been begging for my very own Atari; after a few squinty-eyed attempts at watching the blips shimmy across the screen (we had no vertical hold), I was ready to pack it in by the time New Year’s had rolled around. It was terrible–even worse than trying to play a “computer” game on my stepfather’s TRS-80, a computer so old it took 45 minutes to load programs by cassette. Really, when you think about it, it was a whole lot easier back then to read a book than it was to…hey. Ok, so maybe I didn’t invent this method for reducing media time–but, trust me–it definitely works.