It’s that time of year again when the alpacas have new neighbours. When these twins were a week old, their mother took them further down their paddock into line with our back paddock. The lambs were playing just next to the fence. I came across the paddock – unfortunately with no camera – to find a line of interested alpacas staring at the lambs. Geisha tried to jump on them twice (that’s how they attack unwanted animals) because “They Didn’t Belong There” and “It Was Her Territory”. Thankfully she couldn’t actually get at them through the fence.

Jj is for Jottings 31. Televisions in Children’s Bedrooms.
A few days ago one of my “therapy children” – 7 years of age – brought a soft toy into the session. When asked about it she said she’d been given it as a reward for behaving well in the shop where her parents had bought her a television for her bedroom. (Fancy having to be rewarded for behaving well when you are being bought a big-ticket item!) When asked why she should have a television in her bedroom she said because “lots of” the other children have them in their bedrooms. I don’t know what percentage of children do, but I do know it’s not uncommon. Since children having televisions in their bedrooms fills me with horror, I thought it was a good time to say my piece on the subject. Here are some reasons why TVs and children’s bedrooms should never meet:
• Programs screened when the child is in bed are likely to be inappropriate for the child’s age. Children are unable to discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate content.
• Watching TV in bed will erode sleeping time.
• How are parents going to know if the child wakes up during the night and turns on the television? If children do turn on the TV in the middle of the night, see the first two points above.
• Watching television in bed can be overstimulating and undermine the body’s readiness for sleep. You might argue that the same applies to reading in bed – and it can, but this is more of an adult problem than a child problem, and it is magnified by….
• All screens emit short-wavelength blue light. Light affects our internal body clock, which affects our circadian rhythm, which is our (more or less) 24 hour body cycle which influences many internal functions. This determines when our body is primed to stay awake and be productive and when we feel tired and want to go to sleep. When it gets dark in the evening, our pineal gland secretes the hormone melatonin, which signals to our brain and body that it’s time to get tired and go to sleep. Blue light inhibits melatonin production. As a result, our bodies don’t get the proper signal that it’s time to go to sleep, reducing both the quality and quantity of sleep. In effect, the body is tricked into thinking it’s daytime. Blue light (which we also get from the sun’s rays) are crucial during the day, but have a disastrous effect at night. There is any amount of research on this, from Harvard University, Monash University, University of Toronto to name just a few.
• Tired children do not concentrate or learn well. (Or adults either, for that matter.) Their behaviour is likely to suffer, and this will have a knock-on effect to everybody in the classroom.
Being a parent is a tough call, there’s no denying that. But one of the things we must do is to step away from our children’s whims and “what everybody else is doing” and to think about the long-term effects of our decisions on our child’s health and wellbeing.