It's officially time to throw the remote in the trash...

We all had a vision of how we would parent before we actually had kids. My vision involved homemade baby food, cloth diapers, co-sleeping through the night, etc. Oh, how things change once the baby arrives. Things seem unrealistic, expectations are lowered, we feel some guilt but not enough to change it. Part of my perfect vision also involved no tv watching for Sam. Before he was born I didn't understand why anyone would want their baby watching tv, and I admit that I saw it as a type of laziness in parents. Then Sam came and I needed a way to fill up hours and hours of time, just the two of us. When he was very young he was all colic, all the time, so tv wasn't an issue. Eventually though he settled and every so often we had some down time by watching a Baby Einstein video. As he got a bit older it turned into the occasional episode of Teletubbies, and as of late Sam has discovered the joys of Elmo while mommy has discovered the joys of getting to take a shower while Elmo babysits.

It was never a lot of tv, about half an hour so that I could get ready for the day. And maybe if he wasn't feeling well and wanted to cuddle on the couch...and maybe if he needed to be still to settle down for a nap...you get the picture. And I did this, knowing full well that the American Academy of Pediatrics did not recommend any television viewing for children under the age of two. And I did this knowing why they would make that recommendation. Certainly nothing good was coming from Sam's tv viewing other than some down time for me. He wasn't learning anything from it since we all know babies learn by doing, not by watching a 2 dimensional screen. I could see him sitting there totally zoning out as I thought to myself, "this is not right." He was engaged but not in a good way. When asked if he wanted to watch Elmo though, he would smile and run to the tv waiting to see his friend sing that incredibly annoying song, and he would dance, which I could rationalize as "interaction". And so I continued - a bit of tv, every so often when I needed it, like to shower for 5 minutes without Sam standing there opening and closing my shower door. I had become that "lazy" parent but I didn't care, not enough to change it anyway.

About a month ago a writer on Slate suggested that there might be a possible link between the increase in children diagnosed with Autism and the rise of tv viewing among children in the past 25 years. On first read I thought the idea was interesting, but not very convincing. He had very little in the way of hard evidence to support this theory and acknowledged in the article that it was little more than speculation. I actually was a little pissed off by the article after thinking about it a bit because I think it's dangerous to insinuate that Autism might be linked to something that a parent can control when you have no evidence to support you. Parents of Autistic children, I am sure, already beat themselves up enough wondering if they did something wrong or could have somehow prevented this from happening to their children. For us, it hits close to home because my husband has two autistic half brothers. The idea of my Mother-in-law berrating herself for letting her boys watch too much tv was too much, especially if there was no basis.

Yesterday a follow up article was posted on Slate discussing a recent study done by Cornell University, potentially linking Autism to tv viewing by children under three. If you've not yet seen this article you really need to go and read it (it links to the previous article I mentioned above, which is also worth your time to read as it gives a lot of background on the potential connection between the two). Reading it was enough to make me jump from my seat, grab the remote and delete every episode of Teletubbies and Sesame Street we had. The researchers are not suggesting that tv is the sole cause of the rise in autism, but they, and the writer, believe there is a link, that it is one factor among many. What it comes down to for me is this: no one knows the real cause of autism and why it has become so widespread, but this study has found that tv might play a role, potentially a big role. And since I already know that tv does nothing good for my child and that his time would be better spent doing...well, just about anything else, then that's enough for me. I find the article to be extremely compelling in its case against tv for children under the age of three, not perfect, not without holes in the argument, not to be taken as fact without further scrutiny, but compelling, compelling enough to make me stop doing something that I know wasn't really good for my child anyway. And so the Teletubbie and Sesame Street season passes have been cancelled and the remote has been hidden. We are officially a no tv household, at least before Sam's bedtime we are - Hubby and I are working hard to get through the first season of Lost on DVD and there's no way we're stopping now! I think it's a good decision whether or not this study proves true (and there is already some major backlash and criticism of it). Sam and I have already had more tickle fights, read more books, and done more dancing than we would have on a regular morning. The question is: how am I going to get my shower?