We just did a news piece on a study showing that dads with boys tend to spend more time with their kids than dads who only have girls. That’s a sad bit of news, since girls really need daddy time as well. But I don’t want to get off on that tangent. The second part of the story went on to say that this extra “boy time” was spent watching TV together. So, is watching TV really quality time with the kids, or is it something we do and rationalize that at least they were in the room in while you were enjoying the big game, or worse, the most recent episode of CSI.

I’m of two minds about this because my now 7 year old discovered Pro Football two seasons ago when the Vikings were making a run for the playoffs and as a native Minnesotan, I became a fan again for two or three games. My son went on to become a Saint fan, but that’s another story. That season, last season, and now this season, we’ve watched a lot of football. We’ve made Monday night into pizza night and we’ve shelved a lot of Sunday afternoon activities so we can watch some ball. Anyone who watches football as a group activity knows it’s not a passive endeavor. It’s not like golf. If your heart isn’t pumping and you’re not cheering of someone, you might as well turn it off. My son now knows a lot of the lingo and, while he isn’t yet talking trash, he does some color commentary along the way.

At the same time, my wife started watching “White Collar” with our daughter late last summer. The show, positively rated for tweens, is more passive entertainment as is typical of weekday TV fare. You watch “together,” laugh “together,” but it’s not quite participatory until the debriefs during commercials or after the show. They enjoy it immensely, however.   

You can tell already what my opinion is on the difference between the two types of TV as a family activity.

We don’t watch a lot of TV at home, and during the school year, the rule is no TV or video games during the week, though that rule is broken from time to time when homework is done and piano practice has been accomplished and parents are also looking for a break. It’s in these times, that I’d prefer to break out a board game or even play family Wii together. But is TV a good activity for a family? Is it a bonding event?

My perspective, despite a recent GreatDad news piece on TV as a nurturing tool, is “no.” In a general sense, spending time together doing something is “good.” You do remember peaceful scenes of the family together eating popcorn. However, rare are memories of the night in 1983 when you all watched that one episode of “St. Elsewhere.” TV just isn’t that memorable, except when it’s a news event that brings us all together in a common experience. I watched TV all day on 9/11 and was very glad I had family around to do it with – they are part of my 9/11 memory.

Are there exceptions to this? Yes, of course. I remember watching Marx Brothers movies with my kids, and expect that they will remember them as well. I remember watching “Casablanca” with my daughter because we still quote lines and reference it together. The “classics,” whatever they are, will still be classics and do transcend regular TV watching. Will people care 10 years from now what was on “ER,” or how “Lost” or “Desperate Housewives” took over our lives for brief moments in time. I doubt it.

But back to sports. Is football good time spent with your son? Likely not as good as actually tossing him one in the backyard for an hour, but compared to a lot of other things on TV, it’s perhaps a hair better than most.

What do you think?

As a lazy dad who believes that the invention of the remote control is truly proof of God’s existence and New Testament beneficence, we had to try the Griffin Beacon. Griffin Beacon, using technology from Dijit, turns your iPhone or iPad into a universal remote control.

This is a trick that is harder than you might imagine. Griffin had to create a piece of hardware that sits in your living room and needs to pair with your phone over Bluetooth. The Beacon has all major hardware codes within it, allowing your phone to talk to the DVD player, PVR, TV, Cable box without an IR transmitter.

In practice, the Beacon works pretty well, though you might not want to throw out your main remote quite yet. In our experience, we found it a bit cumbersome on the small iPhone screen and while we liked having a universal remote, we gravitated back to our simple Comcast remote for ease of use.

Additionally, sexy features like a functionality to view our Netflix queue, still don’t yet integrate with actually viewing movies on the device or controlling the Netflix feature on our devices.

Still, Griffin is onto something here with their partner app developer, Dijit. Clearly, this app gives us all a taste of Dijit technology is in development and future updates will make the app far stronger, especially when it runs on iPad with more screen space.

The pros:

Set up after you get the Bluetooth pairing down is very intuitive, making adding components a snap

Online program guide is good and future iterations will allow complete integration with social media. This is just the beginning for Dijit and Griffin.

The cons:

You’ve got one more little device (the Beacon) on your coffee table, and while unobtrusive, it’s another piece of clutter

The Beacon uses batteries which will need to be replaced under heavy use

You have to click the Beacon if you change devices, say to your wife’s phone or to the iPad

Our recommendation: Postpone purchase until you download the app and see what you are actually getting since the sizzle may pull you in before you understand the current limits. Even so, we think this technology has legs for the near future.

Griffin Beacon Specs

This is really bad news for couch potatoes, as well as the rest of us who have desk jobs, but still cram in workouts to make sure we stay fit and healthy. Now studies show that it’s all for nought, and not even the most dedicated among us are immune to the negative affects of a sedentary lifestyle. This is more reason to get out and do things with your kids as an ongoing habit, and to teach them never to get into the TV habit. This is easier said than done. As for me, it sounds like I can just about hang it up, after a career mostly sitting at a desk and in front of a screen, especially if the workouts don’t make a difference.

The latest findings, published this week in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, indicate that the amount of leisure time spent sitting in front of a screen can have such an overwhelming, seemingly irreparable impact on one’s health that physical activity doesn’t produce much benefit.

The study followed 4,512 middle-aged Scottish men for a little more than four years on average. It found that those who said they spent two or more leisure hours a day sitting in front of a screen were at double the risk of a heart attack or other cardiac event compared with those who watched less. Those who spent four or more hours of recreational time in front of a screen were 50 percent more likely to die of any cause. It didn’t matter whether the men were physically active for several hours a week — exercise didn’t mitigate the risk associated with the high amount of sedentary screen time.

The study is not the first to suggest that sedentary activities like television viewing may be harmful. A study last year found that men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars were more likely to die of heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less, even if they exercised. And a 2009 study reported that young children who watch one and a half to five and a half hours of TV a day have higher blood pressure readings than those who watch less than half an hour, even if they are thin and physically active.

[From Inactivity Is Harmful, Even With Trips to the Gym - NYTimes.com]

Giacaomo Knox is launching a new web show and trying to sell the pilot for A Week With My Father, a new show that explores reunions between dads and sons. It’s an interesting idea, and underscores the importance of the father/child bond.

The first episode features Knox reuniting with his father after 33 years apart. The next episode, already in the Development stage, will reunite a former NBA great who came back from a stroke, and his father.

Check it out in this excerpt and the whole show at: aweekwithmyfather.com.

Okay, I was a sucker for the Bonnie Hunt Show. It was pretty funny, but also had a lot of heartwarming stuff that felt kind of true three or four years ago when we were parents of very little kids. This video, as she says in the intro, doesn’t contain anything bizarre or amazing, but if you’ve had a baby or even if you just are human, it’s hard not to smile when you see it.

Nielsen reported last week that children ages 2 to 5 spent nearly 25 hours a week watching television, the highest figure on record. They spent an additional seven weekly hours watching DVDs, playing video games, and watching TiVo-style time-shifted television.

[From Drilling Down - Children Ages 2 to 5 Watch More TV Than Ever - NYTimes.com]

We all know TV can’t be good for little kids. We all read the same reports and know if makes a bad baby sitter. We also depend on it periodically to keep the kids busy for a few minutes while we do a few emails or finish making dinner.

But we know it doesn’t have to be on all the time. Let’s all resolve to leave it off except when we really need it. We can wean the kids off it, pointing them to their pile of unused toys, and maybe getting down on the floor with them to reaquaint them with Legos, Barbies, and train tracks.

There’s no excuse for using a television as a babysitter, unless you’ve lost control of the TV. We all need a break now and then and TV isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is important to know how to control the television, without letting it, and your kids, control you.

Here are a few tips to help make it easier for you to keep the kids playing with their toys and reading books rather than watching mind-numbing TV for hours.

1. Leave the TV off. If you set the example of TV running continuously, you can expect to have kids who watch whatever is on without thinking of alternatives.

2. Schedule program times or use your Tivo to play particular shows. It’s better to have a show in mind rather than letting the TV run. You have more control over what type of show and how long the kids will watch. You can get them to agree to “one Backyardigans,” but it’s harder to turn a show off halfway through when you sense they have had enough.

3. Out of site, out of mind with the family TV. Make you family TV or TVs hard to get to. Most families make them the center of the family room or living room. If you put the TV in a place that isn’t the most comfortable, there’s less incentive to hang around there. Keep TV out of kids’ rooms.

4. Never serve food at the TV.

5. Make your kids ask you if they can watch TV. Rather than allowing them to watch one hour per week, they will get a better idea that watching TV is a privilege rather than an expected dose they should expect every day.

6. Choose quieter shows. Stay away from scary shows or violence, especially with small kids. You probably notice that your kids are more wound up or cranky after watching violent shows, a reaction that shows up in research studies.

While the average American child watches TV 3-4 hours per day, nothing says that your kids have to watch any at all. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises parents of kids 2 and older to let them watch no more than one to two hours daily. The AAP recommends that kids under 2 watch no television at all.

I spoke with the talent agency involved and she told me that this is going to be a documentary about stay at home dads with a bit of a reality TV angle, but tastefully done.

I promised I’d pass on the info:

Are you a Stay at Home Dad or know one?

Looking for STAY AT HOME DADS in Big Cites (San Francisco, Los
Angeles, Orange County, New York City, Chicago)

Working or Not Working. Single or Married.

Looking for Dads or couples with non-traditional arrangements who have
kids. All ethnicity’s and ages.

Please email your name, number, and what city you live in. Also,
please attach a photo of yourself and one your family.

Please send to: casting@valentinetv.net

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

That’s what unhappy people do.

“We looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each one, the people who did the activities more — visiting others, going to church, all those things — were more happy,” Dr. Robinson said. “TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more, and happy people did it less.”

[From What Happy People Don’t Do - NYTimes.com]

While the study can’t definitively say it’s TV that makes people unhappy (versus “unhappy people watch a lot of TV), I think we all know all know it’s likely the former. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise since we all know that gorging on basically everything is bad for you. Gluttony, after all, is a deadly sin. Whether it’s too much steak, vodka, gambling, drugs, or just lying around the beach for years (AKA “sloth,” another deadly sin), too much of a good thing is, well, too much of a good thing.

Perhaps turning off the TV is hardest on us as parents. I know that this week, there will be more of our share of Kung Fu Panda and Wall-E than the kids need. We’ll need it however, if we ever hope to get anything other than canned cranberries on the table on Thursday. But reading this article, which can only confirm your suspicions, might help give me the strength to take the remote control in my hand and press OFF… well, maybe after just one more episode of the Backyardigans.

You can argue about the protectionism of the State, and whether this is too much control, but there is wisdom behind the recent decision by the French broadcasting authority to ban French television from airing TV shows made for kids under three years old.

As with many laws that are put in place to protect those who can’t protect themselves, I think the French have it right here. One thing babies definitely do not need is more TV. The advent of BabyTV in 2006 in the US spurred a national debate and the American Academy of Pediatrics made a pronouncement that babies should be kept from television completely. Now that BabyTV and BabyFirstTV are available in France from foreign distributors, this has become an issue there as well.

As the the French ruling noted, “Television viewing hurts the development of children under 3 years old and poses a certain number of risks, encouraging passivity, slow language acquisition, over-excitedness, troubles with sleep and concentration as well as dependence on screens” (AP 8/20/08)

While many of these TV shows are said to be designed especially for babies, in the Baby Einstein vein, the reality is that many parents (guilty as charged, your honor) use these shows as an electronic baby sitter, for even extended periods of time (not guilty on the second charge). The ruling went on to note, “Television viewing hurts the development of children under 3 years old and poses a certain number of risks, encouraging passivity, slow language acquisition, over-excitedness, troubles with sleep and concentration as well as dependence on screens.”

Anyone knows that the short term benefit of letting kids watch TV for even a short time comes with an immediate cost. They are usually pumped up for a while afterward, if only to list all the toys they suddenly have to have.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp owns Baby TV. Three companies, Regency Enterprises (a partner of News Corp.’s Fox Entertainment), Kardan N.V, and Bellco Capital, a private Los Angeles-based investment fund own BabyFirst TV.