TV guilt

Now that the boy can clearly express his wishes, they often tend towards the watching of television. At the moment he's having a Waybuloo phase. Chuggington is also a favourite, but silly mummy didn't record any episodes and now it's no longer on the iPlayer. At least he seems to have temporarily forgotten about Cars.

The zombie-like state he enters while staring at the box is useful sometimes. I know he won't be getting up to mischief while I have a shower. He isn't jumping on the laptop keyboard while I type this. And at least Waybuloo is teaching him some yoga.

Of course, yet another study has recently told us that watching TV is bad for children's health. A Canadian study of 1,300 children linked longer TV viewing at the age of two to lower levels of classroom engagement, poor achievement in maths, reduced physical activity and increased body mass index.

I suspect that the sort of parents who read about studies like that are the ones who have the least to worry about. We are actually thinking about what the hell we're doing to our kids by the way we bring them up.

During one episode of Waybuloo, he has actually sat still and eaten some breakfast instead of taking two hours over it. Then he announced that he wants to be on the television. I said I didn't know how you get on it, thinking of the group of children on Waybuloo. He said: 'There's a hole?' So now I know I'm going to have to try to explain how TV works sometime soon. Having had his cereal, he wandered about, making himself a bed on the footstool and practising his 'me' and 'I' as in 'I not want to go to sleep.' We played hide and seek when he closed his eyes and told me to count to ten. Now he's hiding the screen behind a blanket because a dinosaur wants to eat the piplings.

And I've just realised that he has started on 'why?' As in why will the TV give him a shock if he rubs the synthetic fleece blanket over the screen. I really don't know. It just will.

So there we go, I'm not banning television although we do avoid adverts. Eventually he gets the urge to get up and do something else anyway. We talk about what's on. His imagination hasn't stopped working. He still runs around plenty. Personally I don't like the thing blaring away at me, but the only way to stop him wanting to watch it would be to get rid of it altogether. Then how would I watch such educational programmes as The Vampire Diaries and My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding?