Don’t Judge Me Because... I Let My 2-Year-Old Watch TV

By Amy Shearn, REDBOOK

My two-year-old has an imaginary friend named Pretend-Murray. She talks to him constantly. "Pretend-Murray!" she'll exclaim while excavating a small mountain of plush. "Why are you sitting on the table?" Or: "Pretend-Murray! Don't poop on your shirt!" (Pretend-Murray poops A LOT.)

Pretend-Murray is furry and orange, and enjoys preschool, having adventures, and playing with The Big Kids, an amorphous group of mischievous but fun children who Harper also spends a lot of time with. I'd love to say she just has an outstanding imagination but alas, she did not create the Murray on which Pretend-Murray is based. The good people at Sesame Street did that. Yes, her Murray is the Sesame Street Murray who has apparently joined the crew sometime in the decades since I frequented the muppet nabe myself -- the large, floppy host who ties together segments by screaming bon mots like "THAT'S THE WORD ON THE STREET!"

Yeah, TV. It's gone on that long, laughable list of Parenting Decisions That Are Much Easier To Make Before Having Children, right up there with "Simply not allowing tantrums" and "Chicken nuggets? Never!" Oh yes, my husband and I were that smug couple buying only BPA-free, pedagogically sound wooden toys crafted by Danish elves (or at least without "Made in China" stickers), reading Proust aloud while spooning her pureed squash. (No, really.) TV? Not our kid! At 6 months she was one of those babies who would sit with pilates-instructor posture and angelically flip through bilingual picture books. No TV necessary. We actually wondered: Who were these people who plopped their sweet babies' developing minds down in front of televisions? Hadn't they heard that the American Academy of Pediatrics is so concerned about the impact of television programming and how it could affect your child's development that they recommend no television at all for kids under 2? Hellooo!

Related: Why I Let My Kids Break All the Rules

Then our second child was born. Within a few months -- as soon as he'd awoken out of that early, super-sleept, roll-with-the-older-sibling-punches infant stage, we'd happily adapted our beliefs system, joining the 90 percent of parents admit their kids watch some form of TV? (This, according to a survey conducted by the same doctors group who advised against it.) After all, we don't want Harper to be completely useless at Trivial Pursuit or whatever the kids are playing these days, like I, a media-deprived child, always was. And now we've joined the vast majority of parents who, when confronted with one of those "My kids don't watch TV!" people reply, "Oh SHUT UP!"

Because let me tell you, I loooove Sesame Street. Every evening, at baby's bedtime, I trill "It's time for Sesame!" -- and I get to bathe and nurse and snuggle the new guy, while she stands like a zombie in the center of the living room, blinking approximately twice in the entire hour. I admit, it really freaked me out the first few times. My creative, active child! She should have been finger painting while listening to Bach! Right? Then I returned to Planet Real Life and accepted the finding of my own parental studies: that while benefits of even educational programming for very young children are debatable, the benefits to their parents are quite tangible. A minute to bathe a new baby without emerging to find the old baby testing out the kitchen appliances. A moment of "me-time," AKA flaking a layer of dessicated cheese product off the table. A half-an-hour to take care of some business, by which of course I mean write a blog post.

And anyway, I soon realized that Sesame Street was just being integrated into all the other stimuli of Harper's world. It's not like an hour of television a day liquidized her brain. (Though she did wake up the other night screaming, "NO SUPER-GROVER, NO!" Oops.) Now when she's playing school/swimming pool/going to Coney Island, it's just that Pretend-Murray and the Big Kids comes along too. I still feel like watching TV is not the best way for her to spend her time, and that in a perfect world, her evening downtime would involve beautiful picture books and maybe some chamomile tea. But you know, it's not a perfect world.

If it were, Pretend-Murray would be cleaning my kitchen floor right now with his furry little mitts.

Read more about REDBOOK's No-Judgment Day at the Motherboard blog.

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