How Being Chinese Affected my TV watching & Chiming in on TV for my Kids

Some Chinese parents don’t allow their children to watch TV at all because that means they’re not studying, reading or playing music.

I didn’t really fall into this category. I was allowed to watch TV, but I really didn’t have much interest in American TV. Basically, growing up, I didn’t watch much American TV. I did however, watch plenty of Chinese soap operas with my family as did all my cousins and my husbands nieces and nephews. Lots of cooking and singing shows and Chinese opera. In fact, I loved it. And one of my earliest memories of watching TV with my grandmother is dancing and roaming around in front of the TV imitating the Chinese opera singings. My grandmother has always loved telling this store to people when she reminisces about my childhood. Even with all that TV we watched with our families, we’re all well educated and are all either heading to college, currently in college or graduated college and well into our careers.

I’ve been chatting with hubs about the whole TV issue and we both agree on one thing. We are not against our children watching TV.

We both have seen all the research results and statistics about the whole allowing TV time before the age of two, but we just don’t see the scary “results” of tv with our lil man or any of the other children we’ve helped raise all these years. But, let me follow both statements with this one…. we don’t believe in TV time all the time.

I’ll modify my TV statement here before anyone jumps on us saying we’re bad parents …

We believe in moderated, supervised, moderate TV/electronics time.

This means, we feel TV is okay for our children IF and only IF we are sitting there with them, moderating what they’re watching and interacting with them. By interacting – we believe taking the time to explain and discuss with them what’s on TV – gives them a better sense of what they are watching and creates an environment that will encourage our children to not only pay attention to what they are watching, but also to help them think and question it.

We don’t believe in plopping our children in front of the TV to stare at it or watch endless non-educational and mindless TV shows.

Ie. No Sponge Bob in this household. Sorry Sponge Bob fans.

Does that mean our children never have alone time in front of the TV or that we think parents who put their children in front of the TV are bad parents? Absolutely not. We understand when it’s necessary to get things done like cooking dinner and you might not necessarily want your children in the kitchen with you or when you’re bleaching the bathroom floor. For those times when we need to utilize the TV for “entertaining” purposes without our interaction being present, we try to:

Limit the amount of time lil man spends in front of the TV alone
Put on something educational like his Signing Time videos
Pay attention to what he’s watching so we can talk to him about what’s on TV even though we’re in separate rooms
Keep the TV off and turn on the radio instead as he loves running around the living room and dining room

Most of the time though, lil man likes to stand at the gate to watch us cooking and ends up ignoring the TV. He loves watching us cook and “chatting” with us so we explain to him what we’re doing while we’re cooking. I’d love to have him in the kitchen with me, but he’s not really at the point where he understands safety in the kitchen yet. We’re hoping by end of this year we can start baking with him.

From watching TV/videos/playing with the ipad and interacting with us, our lil man has learned a great deal, including:

Dancing
Singing
Sign language
Exploring
Trying new things
Sports
Expressing different emotions
Understanding the world and different cultures around him – ie. not getting surprised when he sees people outside the home who aren’t Asian.

That said, I think whether parents want their children watching TV or playing electronics at any age or deciding what to allow their children to watch is completely up to them and their prerogative. We would, however, encourage all parents to interact with their children during their childhood in order to miss the opportunity of watching them develop and also encourage children to be active so they have a balanced lifestyle between indoor and outdoor activities.