one of the big shifts we made with our move towards radical unschooling is the TV question. We had no TV and since the shift after discussions with our soon to be 5 yr old daughter we bought a portable dvd player. We have been built up a modest library for her already and we take her to the video shop to rent two a week… in all honesty we want her to feel that she has enough so she does not request free to air TV which still pushes buttons for us but seems to be the way most radical unschoolers go.

It is totally unregulated, so she controls how much, when and where she watches her dvds.

Obviously she went through the predictable excess in the first period. However that has tapered of totally now. In fact we have been having sleepless nights with our 10 month old son, especially for Anne but also me we are running on very little sleep. At one point i was so exhausted i found myself trying to talk my daughter into watching a dvd with me but she was set on playing games, reading and other things that seemed to take too much energy at that point. In the end she drew for a while to “give me a break” before returning with “the Far Away Tree” – damn those cliff hanging chapters that makes her want to read more!

It was not until after catching up on sleep a little that i could see the irony. From having a daughter who was obsessed about tv when we used to totally restrict it (by not having one), the magic has been taken away from it.

The other noticable thing about it has been that her watching is anything but passive. Anne or I are often watching with her and we are literally talking through, around and over it. Not always but it seems to provoke conversation… for example I ended up having to get photographic evidence that people in diving suits have a tube that goes to their boat recently when our daughter saw it on an elmo cartoon but did not believe it really happened. Anne borrowed “The Company” (movie about ballet) for herself and it became an amazing hit with our daughter and led to them watching it together twice in one day… i saw her practicing ballet in the living room later.

She draws, plays with magnets, dolls, talks while watching her dvds. Sometimes she just sits, especially the first time she sees something she likes but she is generally not satisfied with that for long.

I feel that studies about TV and children need to look at context. Is it a child collapsing in front of TV as a sedative after being over stimulated at school or day? Or is it part of a shared experience with a parent of an unschooled child who is choosing activities that interest her throughout a day… including the occasional dvd.

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