SCENARIO! Your leaders decide to babysit the ward babes on Valentines Day to give parents a night off for romancing and such. You show up to the combined activity, and there's a primary room full of children that seem content to run around chasing each other for the rest of the night. By some miracle, you organize them into groups and send the groups rotating to different activity stations throughout the stake center. The next hour or so is spent playing RedLight GreenLight, Don't Eat the Heart, Bingo, Tic Tac Toe and Mother Goose, frosting Valentine cookies, coloring animal pictures, and making bracelets with a bunch of eight year olds. Towards the end, all the kids meet back in the primary room. Parents will be arriving soon, you need to entertain the monsters for about thirty more minutes, and they're starting to make paper airplanes with their coloring book pages. You don't want the parents to see this chaos. What do you do?
SCENARIO! You go over to a friends house to assist with babysitting her niece and nephews. The kids are adorable, but a handful. As you walk in, the father greets you and says, "Welcome to Madness!" You see that he says this because his grandkids are running around, and he's not even gone yet. Their grandparents leave, and you realize that this energy they're taking out on the furniture might not burn out for awhile, and you're not going to be able to keep up. What do you do?
Believe it or not, these scenarios aren't from a Sunday School lesson where you give the answer to your strip of paper in front of the class. They actually happened to me. It was during these scenarios that I discovered who the best babysitter in the world is--the television. In both cases, the kids stopped running around almost immediately and gathered around to watch the movie as soon as the trailers started to play. That's amazing! No matter what I do, no matter how many piggy back rides I give, and no matter how crazy I act, there's no way I could have kids attention that quickly and for that long. While it was nice to have them quiet and settled, I didn't like seeing their blank eyes glued to the TV. That just can't be good for their brains! Or anybodys for that matter. It made me seriously consider how much television I'll let my kids watch, if I ever have kids someday. But, it's so easy to just turn it on and have them taken care of so you can do something else. I don't know. Commence the end of this random post....now.
7 comments:
You blogged!
Twice!
What?
I say stick 'em in front of the TV for as long as you like-- but only when they're watching the Muppets-- if we're going to let our babes vegetate, we might as well do it in style.
But remember, if your babe is busy watching TV, you might not get the personal interaction that is so precious.
"Arth, arth! I'm a dog!"
I saw all the cars over at the church and thought, "Wow, that's one big job the YW are taking on."
Nicely done.
Thank goodness for the T.V. to numb their brains to a level that prevents them from setting the house on fire. Oh and good job with the blogging. Keep it up.
It sounds like you had your hands full. The T.V. is a great back up in my opinion. It is probably best for the kids to be used sparingly, but your situation is the perfect time to show a movie though.
Well. That sounds like a handful. But I have to admit...I dislike the television.
I may be considered a geek to all my fellow peers because I have absolutely no idea what's going on with Lost, American Idol, or even 24!
However, I have read many books, gone on walks, and such...
I think I'm better off, even though I have about five people I can actually carry a conversation with...
I don't know what to say about television. It's great, but it stinks. I don't like the fact that everything is sooo easy about it (unless you're watching a movie rated PG-13 for "strong thematic elements" which means in other words, it's a thinking movie) you don't even need a very good attention span to figure out what's what.
I will admit it right off, so I don't seem like a hypocrite. Television is a great thing, especially when you've done work and homework all day, and need some brain candy. Then I watch Star Trek or Heroes...
But...I'm mixed about TV...let's just say I have a love/hate relationship with it. I love movies, but I don't really like anything actually on TV.
This comment is too long...I'll just keep ranting and ranting, so I'd better stop.
New revelations concerning television and our futures... Read on, read on!
Apparently our generation is the first to show the somewhat negative impact TV has had on our concentration skills.
There are some people who plug themselves in (take portable DVD players and ipods, for instance) to satisfy a constant need for entertainment. These same individuals might have been exposed at such a young age to the excitement of lights and colors on the television screen that they were deemed hyperactive later on in their lives and given a pill-- the miracle of modern medicine-- to fix the problem. Because of this, Ritalin has now become a universal solution to an unmedicated problem.
So am I suggesting that maybe we're giving children medication for watching too much TV?
No, I'm not. My theory is completely irrelevent. All I'm saying is this:
You've got a problem? Drugs won't solve it.
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