Bonding With Children Over Television

Kids watching TV

This featured post was brought to you by Sam Peters

While you can find hundreds of articles online telling you how you should cut back the amount of time your child watches television, that doesn’t mean that you should just sell your TV and ban the airwaves forever. Instead, find ways to make television watching a bonding experience with your family. It can be both educational and fun.

You don’t always have to watch kid’s shows. Children enjoy learning, they often enjoy sports, and they can also be pretty big fans of animals!

Watching Sports

If there is someone in your house that is a sports junkie, you can help your child enjoy sports if you have great programming available on your TV. Children can learn about how a team scores, different ways that different sports are played and they can join in with rooting for the home team too.

Children enjoy learning, and you may find they also enjoy spending time with their family when it comes to fun activities like watching sports. It lets the adults and kids loosen up together and even bond over teams they like.

Watching Nature and Learning Shows

Nature shows are great as a learning experience. Children can learn all about different animals and different climates. Who knows, the adults in the house might learn something new too.

You can choose different learning shows for children of different ages. This doesn’t have to just be a bonding experience with younger children. Learning shows can be about science, history or anything else that teaches some sort of lesson.

With this type of show your family can have extra bonding time afterward when you take some time to discuss what everyone learned.

Watching the Classics

Something that can be really fun for children is having the chance to watch the TV shows that their parents grew up on. You can still find many older shows in syndication, from Roseanne to Little House on the Prairie. These shows will help teach children what the world was like when you were younger so they can see that different generations actually grow up differently.

Your children may be surprised to find out that you didn’t grow up with the luxury of smartphones and tablets.

Watching Their Favorites

Lead by example and let your children share with you their favorite shows. Not only will you show them that you enjoy spending time with them in their own little world, but you may come up with some interesting questions of your own about these kid’s shows.

There’s nothing childish about a parent watching cartoons and kid shows with their child, so don’t be afraid to embrace your own inner child and have a laugh at Spongebob Squarepants or go on an adventure with Dora the Explorer.

You can make this bonding time extra special and educational by making up games or crafts to go along with what you watch. You can also enjoy snacks together. Make up a mini-tailgate party when a game is on, or try a new cuisine from wherever Dora is visiting!

There are a lot of ways to watch television these days. Standard cable, online streaming, satellite, etc. These packages can be expensive, so don’t just rush out and buy the first all-encompassing package you find. Spend some time learning more about what each of your local providers offers as well as bundled rates, contract deals, etc.

There is also a lot of great content online. Your best bet may be to invest in something like Netflix that can stream through television or computers, and choose family friendly shows to watch together.

Photo credit: Steven Depolo via Flickr

15 thoughts on “Bonding With Children Over Television”

  1. Yes we try to watch learning shows, or shows I used to watch like Sesame Street. Used to love that one !:) It’s fun to try to teach the kids new words, new things…

    thanks!

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  2. Our family loves to watch “How its made” together. Its amazing to see how things are made. We don’t have to answer the questions because the show does it for us lol

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  3. I have fond memories of the rare times my parents would sit down and watch a special movie with us when we were kids. Thanks for sharing!

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  4. We love to watch the kids discovery channel with our kids and we also love the Netflix educational shows. Awesome way to bond with the kids.

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  5. Great blog post! My son and I love to watch the nature channel together.I hope when he gets a little older he will like the history shows that I watch too.

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  6. I love watching nature shows with my kids! Santa still brings them dvds/blurays each year. Often, we will talk about what we learned or remember months later.

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  7. We love to watch the oldies tv shows and my son and daughter like watching these old shows and think they are funny. We also like watching nature shows and know that we can not watch TV all the time because we need to do a lot of other things!

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  8. My grandson’s love to watch the learning channels, especially anything about animals! They like to ask me a million questions too as they watch.

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  9. This is such a great point. Yes, children shouldn’t spend their entire lives in front of the TV, but there can be some benefits to allowing children to watch TC every once in a while. On TV, children can be exposed to different cultures and information that they wouldn’t see in their everyday life. Especially if there is an adult there to discuss what they are seeing, this could lead to more accepting and open-minded children.

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