NewPlew

From thingamababy:

TV-B-Gone by Cornfield Electronics is a universal TV remote with only one button: OFF. The unit is composed of a small plastic box with a button, infrared eye and key chain. Point the eye at a TV set, press the button and within seconds the TV turns off…

My 3-year-old daughter had her annual dental check-up this week. She sailed through like a champ with Mom holding her hand and Dad touching her sandal-covered foot and everyone smiling.

One thing annoyed me about the visit though. In a waiting room filled with people and stocked with plenty of magazines and excellent toddler toys, there was a flat screen TV centrally mounted on a wall showing cartoons and commercials.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends pediatricians “discourage television viewing for children younger than 2 years, and encourage more interactive activities that will promote proper brain development, such as talking, playing, singing and reading together.”

At 3, my daughter is blissfully uninterested in TV. She was also the only one in a dozen toddlers her age at a birthday party yesterday who could sign her birthday card. When other kids are watching TV, we’re learning and being active. Why mess with success?

Then I remembered, I won a TV-B-Gone at a Z Recommends contest a while back, but never used it. So I grabbed it from my car’s glove compartment, sat down in the waiting room, pointed the box, and *click* the TV turned off.

Nobody noticed. It was kind of anti-climatic. I wouldn’t have dared cause a ruckus if kids were watching the television, but this was an excellent example of TV intruding unnecessarily on our public life. The TV was background noise. People accepted its presence even when its presence served no purpose.

You should def. keep reading.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 12:05 pm and is filed under daddy toys. You can follow responses to this entry from the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.