How Much TV Is Too Much for Your Kid?

I’m so old that when I was young, we only had 5 TV channels to choose from.

Think “Mad Men” and you get the picture.

It was hard to "rot in front of the TV” then, even though that’s what my mother frequently told us we were doing when she ushered us outside to play. Today, it is frightening not only how much TV children watch, but what they are watching.

A 2009 Nielsen study found more people watching television than ever before, at about 151 hours a month or about five hours a day.

Studies have shown that preschool kids are watching so much television that it is impeding their sleep. Kids are watching TV in their bedrooms when they are supposedly sleeping and what they’re watching is often so violent, that they then have nightmares.

In fact, kids with TVs in their bedrooms watch about 40 more minutes of TV daily than do those kids without bedroom TV’s. While my daughters begged throughout their childhood years to have a TV in their bedroom, their father and I would not allow it.

I want them to socialize with their family, not isolate themselves, and I want to know what they’re watching. And we're just talking about TV. That's not even talking about the internet, smartphones, tablets or other media.