In article , Spiralmoons wrote:
Thanks guys! I haven't made up my mind yet about the news but we certainly
DO censor everything else the poor thing is exposed to. Mostly because I
don't want to have to deal with nightmares and bad language and such. ...

"Spiralmoons" wrote in message
a...
I have read on here a few times that there are parents who don't watch the
news while their kids are in the room. Can I ask why? I have no formed
opinion on it and now that my ds is of the age (5) where he watches things
and can relate them to his life, I wonder if our house should do the same
(not watch news in front of the kids). Then again I don't want him to be
totally ignorant of current events, or is he too young to be exposed to
the
awful things that can happen. So, again, can someone explain why they do
this or why they don't? So I can make a good decision before I start
staying
up 'till 11:00!
Maybe I should just subscribe to the paper again! LOL!

Hang onto that last sentence!

My wife is a news junkie, but relies on radio (mainly NPR and BBC) and
newspaper (different ones on different days: NY Times Tuesday for
Science Times, SF Chronicle on Wed for food, ...) for the news, not
TV. Not only does this avoid the problems of traumatic TV viewing for
our son, it provides us with less distorted news coverage. When we
travel, my wife does watch news on TV, but we find the dumbed-down
talking heads rather annoying.

By eliminating the TV completely, we don't have the problems other
people seem to have with saturation advertising targeted at our child.

We also have the paper sitting around for our son to read if there is
something interesting (he often reads a short article from the Science
Times section of the NY Times, and occasionally another article will
catch his attention).


--
Kevin Karplus http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
Professor of Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
Affiliations for identification only.