Let me describe to you the scene at my house at five o' clock in the afternoon: the boys are hungry. Climbing up pantry shelves, dropping chocolate chips on the floor, gummy vitamins are being passed around, yeast strewn all over (its empty package abandoned on the kitchen counter), popcorn starts popping in the microwave and raisins, chips, frozen blueberries and mochi balls are are being pulled from the freezer and floated around to all the kids in the yard as well. In short, it's mayhem. This is the witching hour.
PRE-SITUATION: GET CONTROL. Send the neighbor kids on home to dinner. Bring all of my own kids inside. Wash hands, clean-up.
SITUATION # 1: I need to buy some time to make dinner. Snacks in this situation are not an option. It would fill them up enough so they wouldn't eat dinner, but leave them starving as soon as dinner has been cleared up and put away.
SOLUTION # 1: Redirect the children to an apple, orange, banana or carrot. Look at it as an amuse bouche. It wets their palate, but does not fill them up. Ok, so it is a snack, but a healthy one. It buys you time.
Now I've decided to do chicken tenders and homemade potato chips. Won't take long, maybe twenty or thirty minutes. This is when I turn around from taking stock of the fridge and see Soda, my three-year-old who is still in the hunter-gatherer phase, squatting on the floor eating from a bag of fortune cookies he found from the counter top array.
SITUATION # 2: The kids are still hungry.
SOLUTION # 2: "EVERYONE TO THE COUCH. WE'RE PUTTING ON A MOVIE!"
The movie is something you fight within yourself everyday. There are the brain development studies; there is your personal ideology that America's problems today are a direct result of moving too far from how it was on the farm (Philo Farnsworth notwithstanding, no TVs on the farm); there is lethargy and obesity and laziness AKA the "couch potato" syndrome to worry about. You must therefore use the movie sparingly and use discernment in choosing.
So to rate a movie for your children ask yourself these questions:
Yes = thumbs up
1) Is it educational on some level?
2) Does it have music?
3) Is the animation tasteful on an artistic level?
Yes = thumbs down
1) Is it dumb?
That pretty much sums it up. Use movies only when you absolutely need to--to prep dinner last minute, have an intense conversation with a drop-in friend, or write that novel you've been meaning to. The danger of overuse with the old movie solution is that the novelty of it might wear off.... Then again, knowing my kids, it may not. Good luck. Choose wisely.
*GF Chicken Tenders and Homemade Potato Chips coming soon
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