My wife told me recently of a friend of hers, a great mom, who
complained about her kids playing video games. Her two boys have been
playing their Nintendo DS and Wii all day, every day, all summer. She
said she couldn't take it away from them because they scream and cry
and say she is a terrible mother and she doesn't love them. Her boys
are 5 and 7 years old.

My heart broke hearing this. I can feel you cringing, too.

My
wife's first thought was, "If you didn't let them have a DS, then you
wouldn't have to take it away." I agree, but this is not the hard part.
Our family has worked diligently to limit all types of media for our
kids, even TV. I recently read about some research into kids and media
written by Lisa Guernsey
who really seems to understand the complexity of the problem of media
and your little baby. She asks the hard questions in her book, Into the Minds of Babes, and in her recent article for Newsweek, Sesame Street: The Show that Counts.
Lisa describes how some media, including the one that started all,
Sesame Street, can actually positively affect learning. It makes
understanding the choices we make about our kids and media more rainbow
and less black and white.

Our kids actually watch less TV now
than they did when they were younger. My son doesn't like to watch a
show for more than about an hour. This didn't happen over night. We had
to say no. A lot. It was hard, but not the way you might think. It took
courage to say no and suffer the consequences of screaming and crying.
It takes courage to say no when all your friends let their kids have a
(Wii, Playstation, DS… fill in the blank). It is not a monumental
courage, but rather it is a daily decision by decsion type of courage
that many parents don't have. It's difficult because you know it will
make your kid happy, at least for a little while, but what we don't see
when we give a kid digital entertainment that can walk around with them
is that their little brains can't handle more than one reality at a
time, and the digital one is much more exciting. That is, unless they
really get interested in the world around them.

My favorite response to the question, "Can we watch TV?" is, "No, but you can go outside."

Getting
kids to give up the digital world for the beautiful world also takes
more than courage. It takes time. Like the failed drug campaign, "Just
say no," saying no doesn't work that way in the real world. We have to
say, "No, lets do something else fun. How about painting, building a
fairy house, making a potion in the garden?" "What if we go for a walk,
cut the grass with scissors, build a tower out of pretzels." Once you
get them involved, they will take over and teach you things about
gardens, fairies, or pretzels you never knew before. It takes courage
to say no, but it als takes courage to face the never ending expanse of
your child's imagination and go there, without fear, stepping joyfully
off the edge of adulthood and allowing them to take you across the
universe.

Image by Mark A. Hicks: http://newyorkkids.timeout.com/articles/features/70656/how-to-say-no-to-kids