A Little Light Reading?

by Erin

We decided a few weeks ago that if we are going to read to MiniSquatch in the womb that we may as well read him/her Shakespeare. After some deliberation and feedback from the internet, we settled on The Tragedy of King Lear because, though we’ve both seen it performed, we don’t know it or other Shakespeare plays very well (as evidenced, of course, by our inability to answer Jeopardy questions while eating dinner a few weeks back). So we pulled out our giant Complete Works of William Shakespeare and proceeded to read Lear aloud in bed one night.  We discovered, sadly, that neither of us have undiscovered theatrical talents and that we pretty much suck at reading Shakespeare out loud in a way that gives the words any life. Dan suggested that if we both had our own copy of Lear it might be easier to follow along.

So, in the midst of Christmas shopping, Dan picked up two copies of the The Tragedy of King Lear. He also picked up these two parenting books that have been on our radar for a while: Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy and Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott. I started reading Free Range Kids because I’d already read about Lenore Skenazy (see Salon) and know the back story to Free Range Kids — Skenazy let her 9 year old son find his way home (Brooklyn) from Bloomingdale’s (Manhattan) using the subway and then she wrote an article about it for the New York Sun. Her article caused a huge backlash from concerned parents and Skenazy was dubbed “America’s Worst Mom.” She (and sometimes her son) did countless interviews about allowing him to ride the subway alone. You can read about all of this on her blog. So far I don’t have anything groundbreaking to report since I pretty much already agree with Skenazy completely. I did learn, however, that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under 2yrs have ZERO exposure to TV. We weren’t planning on using TV to raise our kids but, still, I didn’t know that they weren’t supposed to watch ANY TV before age 2. I guess we won’t be needing any 0-24mo Baby Einstein videos!

I might poo-poo the TV recommendation except that there was a really funny anecdote in Free Range Kids– a mother brought her 11mo old son to a play group where all of the kids were between 9 and 11 months old. After they’d been there for a little while, the host-mother put a Baby Einstein video in and instantly all of the kids stopped playing with each other and became mesmerized by the video. IF that isn’t enough evidence, the narrator then observed as her own son (who’d not had much if any exposure to TV) at first crawled around behind the TV to see what was going on and then after a little (carefully monitored, of course) exporation, he crawled up to another kid who was staring intently at the TV and inspected the toy that the kid was holding. After a few seconds, he looked at the kid, then looked at the TV, then looked at the kid again and took his toy away! The unsuspecting mesmerized kid didn’t even notice that his toy was gone.

I’d really like to think that my kid would be the crafty one observing the situation, understanding what was going on, and taking the toy rather than being the TV-obsessed statue totally oblivious to the world around him her. Of course, we don’t have kids yet so who knows what sort of survival techniques we might need in the first few months of new parenting. Plus, you know, we like TV.

Tags: Parenting Books, Reading, Shakespeare, TV

Posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 2:59 pm in Books. You can read the commentary chatter on this post by subscribing to the RSS 2.0 feed. If you're in to that sort of thing.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.