Unlike a lot of moms in the natural parenting blogosphere I don’t really harp on media and electronics too often. We are not a TV free house and never will be. My kids all have a TV, an xBox, and a computer in their bedrooms. We are plugged in and I quite enjoy it that way. For me it is more about balance and making sure we stay connected as a family and to the outdoors and other screen-free pursuits whilst still enjoying our screen time. I think our approach has worked pretty well.
My oldest plays video games with a historical bent and comes to me daily to tell me what historical things he learned on the game and then confirmed online for accuracy. These games have helped him discover that he LOVES history, especially as it relates to military and world wars. He just finds it all fascinating. My middle child plays a game daily that is all about architecture and world building. Both have gravitated towards educational games so I count myself lucky. Neither of them watches very much TV and both will happily spend 5-6 hours outside after school if the weather is nice. My youngest is my TV watcher and he watches a little more than I would like but happily he loves to watch Netflix documentaries about dinosaurs, prehistoric time periods, and animals.
I watch a handful of shows via primetime and cable network…they keep me from cancelling our cable. Though I always watch them later via DVR because I refuse to sit through commercials. I love True Blood, Justified, Game of Thrones, Dexter, Grimm, Person of Interest, Burn Notice, Lost Girl, and Elementary. I also love to watch Netflix and the amount of conscious and inspirational documentaries on it is amazing. For only $7.99 a month we are able to stream all of their content to our TVs…via xBox, Wii, and Roku. Sometimes it sucks me into TV that does not better my mind…like when I watched the first episode of Gossip Girl (just to see what the hullabaloo was all about) and then spent a week watching every single episode of every single season. :) Mostly though it enables us to watch all kinds of documentaries.
I recently asked fans on the NaturesMoms fan page what documentaries they were streaming via Netflix and here are some of the standouts…
Environmental Movies:
Bag It
No Impact Man
Vanishing of the Bees
Tapped
Gasland
Food/Health Documentaries:
Food Matters
Food, Inc
Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead
Vegucated
Super Size Me
Forks Over Knives
Hungry for Change
Chemerical
Growing Food Documentaries:
Fresh
King Corn
Farmageddon
Dirt
Babies/Children:
The Business of Being Born
The Vaccine War
Loving Lampposts (about autism)
This is only a teeny tiny sampling. They have just about every kind of documentary/movie you could want from animals and national parks to religion and human rights stories. If you don’t have game consoles and you don’t want to watch on your computer I suggest a Roku. It is about the size of a deck of cards and allows you to stream all sorts of content …Netflix, Hulu, TED talks, exercise videos, etc.
What are you watching?
I love your list of documentaries! Love that Netflix has such a great selection!
OMG… I’ve seen ALL of them except the very last one. That’s my big love on Netflix, is the documentaries!! They were all awesome, and definitely worth watching. :)
Thank you for your balanced approach to technology. It’s refreshing to hear someone be real about it. I have a degree in computer science and I work as a database administrator, but I’m slowly transitioning towards starting a local apothecary farm business bringing herbal medicine to my community. That said, I respect both technology and nature. There has to be a balance in everything and I think sometimes us crunchy peeps get a bad rap for wanting to go back into the “stone age”…or live like the Amish as my boyfriend likes to tell me. But, really, it’s all about bringing things back into balance. You don’t want the pendulum swinging too far the other way where technology is rejected because the world will just leave you behind….but we can’t keep going down the same path of working and living indoors in front of glowing screens all the time. So, anyways, thanks for your balanced approach :-)
I too love netflix – although we go the mailing route – and I agree that you can’t leave technology behind – it isn’t even plausible…however, I am curious about your take on the potential hazards of all the streaming that goes on around us…smartmeters, wifi, cell towers, etc. I have done my best to “limit” exposure to the family as much as I can – getting “safer” cell phones, refusing the smartmeter, not allowing wifi in the house (to the chagrin of my teenager). From what I have looked at, I am not comfortable with the lack of research out there on the topic…Admittedly, I don’t have the time I would like to keep up to date on the latest – perhaps some of you other nature moms out there have some info that makes you feel more comfortable with it? I’d love to hear more thoughts…