How much of TV is 'too much' ?

Well, that’s a question without standard answers!! It’s very difficult to decide how much is enough, when it comes to TV watching. It varies from child to child, parent to parent, situation to situation. But then there should be some guidelines to help us decide when to tell the child that ‘tube-time’s up for today!’

Here are a few things we can consider to come to conclusion in a particular child. May be its too much of TV watching when:

1. The child watches TV more than he plays actively (if he watches TV for 1 hour in a day, he should be getting 4 hours of play. If he takes big siestas or goes to day-care and doesn’t play for 4 hours, then cut down his TV hours too) 
2. The child uses your TV sofa equally or more than you do (if you watch a lot of TV you cannot expect your child not to. So to show him the time-limits, you need to cut down your TV hours too)
3. The child starts seeing the characters in his nightmares/ sleep-talks about these characters ( many cartoon programs are full of unpleasant situations and affect children's psyche deeply. so if 1 hour of TV watching is giving these nightmares, encourage him to watch something else and that too for shorter duration) 
4. The child gets a little cranky after TV watching (watching TV causes headaches, restlessness in kids. the moment your kid shows signs of irritability/ restlessness, switch off the tube and divert his mind to another activity. make a note of the time spent in front of TV and next time divert him to another activity before the threshold is crossed). 
5. The eyes look red or watery (small kids cannot tell if their vision is getting hazy. keep an eye on the first sign of vision trouble. if 1 hour of TV watching is giving your child watery and red eyes, TV watching needs to be cut down further). 
6. The TV characters have an impact on the way your child behaves (kids form their ego-ideals from TV shows too and start getting influenced by the characters. If the influence is so big that it affects the way your child speaks or walks, or if it affects your child’s choices heavily or if it induces fears in his mind, then you need to cut down that show qualitatively as well as quantitatively.
7. The child cannot do something else during his TV time (if you find it difficult to get him off-TV for an outing during his scheduled TV time, then you know he is heading towards TV-habits)

TV watching hours is different for different children, at different age. 

Play group or not..thats the question

Often, there are many questions in parents' life when their baby becomes a toddler, "When to send our child to playgroup? Is playgroup really required? Should we directly send the child to nursery?"

Main point # playschool is not "required". It is optional. There is nothing good or bad about it. There is nothing useful or useless about it.

There are many reasons why parents go for playgroups at the age of 2 years. Of course, reasons are different in different cases:

• Living in a nuclear family doesn't give any exposure to social skills and parents feel its better to send the child to school to mingle with kids than to stay at home with a maid.
• With both parents working, parents do not have any option but to go for early schooling + daycare
• Parents who opt for mainstream school for nursery may find admissions easy if the child has attended playgroup before nursery.
• If friends' and neighbors' kids go to a certain playgroup and are doing good, then the parents do not want to take any chance and put the child in school to keep abreast with others.
• The home environment is very unhealthy and parents feel it's better to keep the child away from home for at least a few hours.
• Parents feel, that the earlier the school, the more will be the development
• The child is very active and restless at home and parents feel that going to a structured environment for couple of hours will do him good

There can be many more reasons, but these are most commonly prevalent ones.

Don't go by what others say. Think, judge, evaluate your situation, preferences, and ideologies, and then take the decision. Playgroup is generally any child's first experience of an outside structured world. If that experience is good, it gives a confident start to education. If that experience is bad, it gives a nervous start to education.

So, even when you take the decision, you need to be very careful and watchful about the child's on-going day-to-day experiences there. Since a playgroup child is not very verbal about his needs, wishes, thoughts, ideas, and fears, you may find it very difficult to note his experiences unless you are sensitively tuned in to his first world of education-cum-socialization.