Public Broadcasting and My Adopted Child

A white circle in a black square! Actually, it's the moon over Green Lakes State Park
during our September camping trip. I desperately need a telephoto lens!

 A slightly better photo of the moon, taken this winter.

There is a movement afoot by people of political ideologies that frankly infuriate me to zero out federal funding for public broadcasting. This is under the guise of balancing the budget, but the $400 million we're talking about amounts to $1.35 per person per year, and won't even make a dent in reducing the federal deficit. We were willing to hand $70 billion to fat cat bankers who still got their $20 million a year salaries and multi million dollar bonuses even after destroying the global economy, but we're going to take Sesame Street away from our children? While also taking away Head Start programs? I firmly believe this is not about balancing the budget; this is about restricting access to information.

But enough of me on my soapbox. What I want really want to share is what PBS has meant to my son and me in his first year ever having access to television, beginning at the age of four.

Children with developmental trauma (see my previous posts on older child adoption and developmental trauma) have difficulty watching TV at all. The imagery seems to somehow affect neural pathways and can bring out aggression quite easily. I have found that I can sit with T and watch certain programs for short periods of time without triggering difficult behavior. And where have I found those programs? PBS. When he was pre-verbal, Curious George, who is also non-verbal, was his program of choice. Then we moved on to Caillou, who was his age and needs training wheels to ride his bike, much to T's disdain, and Dragon Tales -- which no longer airs on PBS, but started there. Certain episodes of Dragon Tales got a little scary -- the producers were trying to help children to understand how to work through fear -- but T would get visibly upset and actually say, "Too scary, too scary," so we would turn it off and read a book. Dinosaur Train was a hit with him for a long time, and still makes the top three list. Now his favorite show is Thomas and Friends, but he also usually enjoys Clifford the Big Red Dog and is starting to watch Arthur.

The imagery in these programs seems to be gentle enough to prevent T from presenting with aggressive behavior. Nickelodeon has Dora the Explorer, but the parent types find her voice to be too loud and grating to be tolerable. All dialog in that program seems to be yelled. Where are the indoor voices? I do like the educational value in Dora, and the fact that the lead character is a female, but can't handle the shouting. Sponge Bob Square Pants, a favorite with the older two in this house -- I see no redeeming value in that program at all. Perhaps I need to try again, but through my adult lenses, it just seems like ridiculously silly entertainment for the purpose of keeping kids glued to the screen to get to the commercials for toys and whatever else they pitch to kids these days.

So PBS it is. And not just for kids shows. Very early on, when T had receptive language but not expressive language, we happened on a NOVA special about the galaxy while I was working on retrieving from the DVR one of the kids shows we had saved. He was enthralled. I hit the record button so we'd be able to see the show in its entirety, albeit, in 10 - 15 minute segments, and we continued to watch for another 10 or 15 minutes that evening -- Curious George having been forgotten for the night. That program ignited in him a curiosity for anything and everything about our solar system. Do we read "Kitten Finds a Home?" at bedtime? Sometimes. But we're as likely to read "Our Solar System," one planet per night.

When I registered T for kindergarten, I was given a form that listed off the things I should be working on with him to prepare him for the rigorous classwork ahead. He should know all the letters of the alphabet, uppercase and lower, out of order. Check. He should know how to count to twenty. Check. He should know his shapes and colors. Check. Have five sight words. Um, check, and make that twenty at this point. And he's also beginning to sound out words -- despite not having heard a word of English for the first four years of his life.

No, we've blown by all that and are on to the planets. Which ones are hot? Which ones are cold? Which ones are near to Earth? Which ones are far away? How long would it take to go to Mars? Could an airplane fly in the clouds of Jupiter? Is the sun hotter than Venus? His thirst for knowledge of the universe seems endless.

We also watch Nature programs, although I have to pre-screen for images of animals hunting down and eating other animals. That seems to bring out aggression that we are trying to avoid. He decided he wanted to kill a wolf, which was kind of a scary thing to hear in a "hmmm, we better keep the knives up and out of reach for a while longer sort of way," but when I asked why, he said, "Because wolf eat our cats." I had to assure him a wolf wouldn't eat our cats because our cats stay inside.

But we watched a program about the Himalayas a few weeks ago that he found absolutely fascinating, as did I. We've watched a show about desert lions and another one on bald eagles living in the upper Mississippi -- interesting especially since there are bald eagles overwintering in Syracuse this year, feeding out of the horrendously polluted Onondaga Lake; Rachel Carson is probably rolling over in her grave. And my handy-man-to-be loves This Old House.

I think of the junk that passes for programming on commercial stations -- That's So Raven and Sponge Bob Square Pants and other stuff I can't even remember the name of but that's on the tv on the ceiling in the pediatric dentist's office, and then I think of my child sitting next to me learning that snow leopards aren't really leopards, but a type of tiger. Or that there are birds who actually fly over Mt. Everest to get to their summer breeding grounds. Over the highest mountain in the whole wide world. Without oxygen canisters. Wow. Or that you should be a good friend, share, help others, and play fair -- values that Wall Street and our Ann Marie Buerkle, our current congresswoman who voted to zero out funding for public broadcasting (disclaimer -- I didn't vote for her) should heed.

This week is 'V' week at school. Each child has to try to come up with a word that starts with 'V.' V is a tough letter. I'm thinking "vim, vigor, voracious, volatile, vortex" -- all a little above the preschool level. I asked him yesterday, "What word did you say for 'V'?"

"Venus!" he exclaimed with a proud smile. Thank you PBS. For this, I'll gladly pay my $1.35 in annual tax money to keep you federally funded. I'd even pay double.