We spent the weekend in the Blue Mountains at the Winter Magic festival. The parade was great like a mini hippy mardi-gras. Good to see the hippies are still alive and well in the mountains - there was even an anti-howard cotingent (which reminded me of how the left seems to have become almost 'quaint' and almost irrelevant)
On Sunday there was 'the biggest pantomine' on at the Everglades. A huge garden set up as a magic world with fairies, witches, rainbow circuses, trolls and dreamtime characters. My 3 year old was fascinated but also pretty scared by the scarry bits. It took a lot of debriefing to explain the witches are not going to come and eat her up.
Speaking of scarry stuff and kids imaginations it has been something we have been grappling with in terms of how much tv is it ok for a 3 year (or 2 year old) old to watch? Also does watching scary stuff give them nightmares? How do you explain what the withces and monsters mean when they are too young to really know the difference between what is real and imaginary?
In the Good Weekend on the weekend Catherine Lumby from the Media Dept at Sydney Uni said she thinks the 'experts' are overreacting about the danger of TV for young children. I think tend to agree, we live in such a media saturated world it is really hard to not have young children exposed to TV. I guess the danger is that being such a good 'babysitter' it's easy to fall into the trap of just putting ont he TV so you can get on with what you need to do.
I think the idea of limiting screen time for kids is a good idea. This includes TV, internet, games etc and getting them to manage this. So if they know they have 2 hours a day they can work out how they want to use it.
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