How much TV or screen time is too much for our children?

So.... the TV.

No matter where you look on the internet, you can find pretty stringent guidelines about when your children should be allowed to watch television and exactly how much they should be allowed to view.  Per the AAP, children under the age of two should be allowed no screen time whatsoever.  Beyond the age of two, children should be allowed no more than 1-2 hours of screen time per day.  And - by screen time - they mean the TV, the iPad, your smart phone, or any other type of media your child may be viewing or using to play.

As a speech pathologist, I have some thoughts and feelings about this.

Surprising?  Probably not.

To be totally blunt - I think it's a great concept.  I completely understand where the recommendation comes from and why they agreed on these specific guidelines.  Let's delve into that piece first before we talk about the one small downside I see to this recommendation and stance.

Early on in child development, the more input you can give your child, (in most cases) the better.  Studies have shown that increased use of television in homes with small children decreased speech, in short.  Findings have shown that while a television was on in the background, the number of utterances (how many times the parent spoke to their child) and the mean length of utterance (the number of words exchanged) both decreased when compared to a parent and child in a room without a television playing.

If a television is on all the time, this can have serious consequences to a child's development.  The more they are exposed to speech, language, and social interactions - the better it is for their cognitive development.  During the first few years where speech, language, and cognition develop in a series of slow crawls and big booms, the amount and type of interaction they have with their main caregivers molds them and teaches them how to grow.  If you ever look at a speech pathologist's language delay handouts or packets to parents for homework, you can see that the AAP's stance fits well within what we recommend to further speech and language development.  A few of the recommendations we give parents of children with speech and language delays are to limit television time, spend a specified amount of time per day or week engaged in play with the child while enriching their language environment, and talking through your daily routines on a level that fits their current level of development - to name just a few.

All of those recommendations are to increase speech and - again - give the child a highly enriched language environment from which to learn.  These recommendations are in stark contrast to sitting your child in front of a television and letting them zone out all day long.  That doesn't provide any real interaction with other human beings and in a lot of cases doesn't teach them anything that they can apply or carry over to real life.

It's just a time filler.

So then we travel a few years down the line past the toddler age and into young childhood, to where the increase in television time can lead to, "attention problems, school difficulties, sleep and eating disorders, and obesity," per the AAP.  Those aren't likely goals you'd ever want to accomplish for your older child either.

For all of those above reasons, I totally agree with the AAP.  There are many parents and families who rely much too heavily on a television to parent their children, and if that recommendation helps even just a few of these families to limit their screen time, then it is a successful venture.

However, I feel like it makes the rest of the parents who already use media sensibly with their children get a little bit out of control at times.  Don't deny it, you know that sanctimommy whose child has never seen a television program!  In the world of mommy wars and competition to make your child the best, brightest, and smartest - forbidding the "dangerous" screen time tends to be the other extreme I see many parents going to these days.

Little Man watching TV on a sick day.

But just like I don't want our TV on all the time, I also think it can be an excellent aid to teaching our children, and we might be missing out on teachable opportunities if we're never using a television, iPad, or other device.

(...Not to mention decreasing their chances to learn the very technologies that drive many of our jobs and the workforce our children will likely enter in the future.)

That said, I completely believe that as a parent and within your family unit, it's really important to find a spot where you are comfortable with the amount of your screen time.  This may mean little to no screen time, or it may mean a bit more screen time with which I would personally be comfortable.  Your family is not my family and you are not me, and what works for me may not work for you, plain and simple.  And I totally understand that and pass no judgement.

But before you make the choice about your child's screen time, I want to chat about it just a bit more.

If you're a new parent wondering how to address screen time as your child becomes older or even a seasoned parent wanting to address the level of screen time used in your home, then this week's posts are for you.  I'll be spending the entire week talking about topics such as: the logistics of our personal screen time at the TNO household, what television shows I recommend as a speech pathologist, what television shows I don't recommend, how to use the television to teach your children, and I even have a little Tip & Trick post lined up relating to the same theme.

Head on back to the blog this week to check out all of that and more, and if you find it to be helpful, please share these posts via Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest!!!

The Savvy Craft Etsy Gift Card Giveaway!!!

I am unreasonably excited to share this post with you all, like way excited.

In the past few years I've become pretty hooked on a sweet little website selling crafty, homemade, and vintage items from small sellers.  Many of you may know it as Etsy.com.  Being able to find adorable, quality-made, and unique clothing, jewelry, home decor, gifts, and many other items all in one place is fabulous.  It's driven me to look further for better-crafted items from smaller sellers rather than always running out to the big box stores to buy just one more piece of cheap plastic something made overseas.

Thankfully, in the recent few years, I've also made friends with some ridiculously crafty and creative mamas - one of which being my friend Modern June.  MJ rocks my socks off at pretty much anything handmade and beautiful, and you may have seen a few of her camera straps and scarves on the likes of daily deal sites like GroopDealz.com.  However, in the recent past MJ began to notice that more and more of these sites are beginning to sell more and more manufactured items & less and less handmade creations.

So, MJ decided to create...

The Savvy Craft is a brand new daily deal site set to open shop online on June 1st, and it will feature daily deals on only handmade or homegrown items.  Because MJ is a mom who works from home making and selling her own items through her Etsy shop, it became really important to her that the work at home mom and handmade crafter are still being represented when selling their lovingly created treasures.

I can seriously stand behind this line of thinking as there have been several times I've ordered an item off of a normal, non-handmade daily deal site that has not been up to par quality-wise.  A shirt I'd recently ordered from a larger deals site even came to me once with a button already missing!

When you're buying from a handmade business like The Savvy Craft, you know that these items are made with love and are created with quality in mind.  I am super excited for the site to open shop.  A few of the upcoming teasers I can share with you are:

- Headbands and hair clips from Hello Charlotte James   {ummm... hello Little Lady accessories!}

- Resin bobby pins from Studio 228

- Reusable snack bags from Daisy & June

& - Lace button earrings from Shared Joy

In celebration of the big kick-off in the next few weeks, here's a little message from the sweet and savvy MJ herself:

"The Savvy Craft is all about support and love of all things handmade.  It is our pledge to feature only handmade craft artisans and their amazing creations.  To show everyone how gorgeous handmade can be, we are giving away a 25$ Etsy gift card!"

Get to entering below and as always, let me know if you have questions at thenaptownorganizer at gmail dot com!!!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

TNO's Tips & Tricks 17 - Green your floor cleaning routine

For years I have sworn by Swiffer products.  The sweepers, mops, and dusters have always worked really well for my OCD self - who constantly needs everything to be in place while being neat & tidy.  In a former rental of mine, I used a real broom and mop to clean up wood and laminate flooring and absolutely hated everything about it.  The Swiffer product line fixed all the problems I had with a traditional mop and broom, by making the process quicker, easier, and less of a hassle to clean the actual cleaning tools.

However, I really hate that Swiffer products aren't eco-friendly and can get very wasteful.

If you think about it, each time you're using a Swiffer sweeper or wet mop, you're using a new wipe on the bottom of the sweeper or mop that you throw away when you're finished.  If you're anything like me, that means you're throwing away at least 6 but sometimes more than 10 wet and dry wipes per week.  If we take that at it's maximum, I'd be throwing away over 500 wet and dry wipes per year, not to mention the packaging involved.  It's a hefty amount of trash.

If you look further into the financial cost of the refill wipes, based on those numbers I would be throwing away almost $140 per year on wipes for my floors.

And to take it just one step further - let's look into the ingredients and chemicals in the Swiffer products.  I used their Wet Jet wet mop for years, and hadn't once thought about the ingredients until I had little children crawling around on the floors I'd just cleaned.  Specifically, the bottle states that it contains cleaning agents (including solvents), fragrance, and water.  If you look deeper onto the company's website, it says the cleaner contains water, ethanol, alkyl polyglycoside, acrylic copolymer, various fragrances, benzisothiasolinone, and polydimethylsiloxane.  That's just a few too many chemicals for my liking.

Also, there was the whole internet rumor going around that someone's dog died after being exposed to the product due to one of the ingredients being something used to make anti-freeze.  I can't confirm or deny the validity of that rumor, but - yeah, not exactly giving me the warm fuzzies about this product.

All of the above information taken into consideration helped me to finally make the jump into my next tip:

If you're not super crunchy or green-minded, this tip may be for you because of how simple and easy of a fix it can be.  Without barely any cash, you can take that same Swiffer device you have laying around your house and turn it into a greener cleaner, and here is how:

For Swiffer Wet Jet mops - 

Instead of using a new mop pad every time you clean, look at your local grocery or big box store next to their steam cleaners for sale.  Many times they will also sell replacement steam cleaner pads.  Any steam cleaner pad that looks like it has a velcro-like material on one side will stick to your swiffer as well.  We personally use machine washable Steamboy brand T2 pads, which run you around $10 per pad.  This is around the same cost of one box of Wet Jet refill pads.

For the wet mop solution, we use an old Swiffer Wet Jet solution bottle, but have just worked around the fact that they build the caps so they cannot be removed.  If you look at your solution bottle when it is empty, you'll see that you cannot get it off, even with massive effort.  We got around this {I found a tutorial somewhere on the internet, although I'm not sure what the original source was - possibly here?} for sticking the bottle in very hot water in order to loosen it enough to remove the cap.  Initially, I tried to stick the bottle in a warm cup of water from our Keurig, but that wasn't hot enough.  I found that I actually had to boil a pot of water and then stick the cap into it like the above picture.  Shortly thereafter, I was able to remove the cap.

Instead of refilling it with more chemicals, I added in a mix of equal parts vinegar and water plus some essential oils for smell.  {We use this mixture on all of our hard floors, which happen to be ceramic tile.  I've not tested this product on wood floors as we don't have any in our home.}  This eliminates the need for toxic chemicals, especially around your children and pets.  Vinegar does just as nice of a job of cleaning and isn't harmful if accidentally consumed by your child.  I tend to be overly cautious as we have a teething soon-to-be-crawler and a two year old who still sucks his thumb after touching everything.

For Swiffer Dry Sweepers -

Instead of using a new dry wipe for every clean, I use a simple microfiber washcloth.  Any thin washcloth will fit into the small pad insert tabs on the top of the sweeper, and can be thrown into the wash immediately after use.  Done and done.

{Reader submission tip?  If you're done cloth diapering or can spare one microfiber insert, these also work really well as a Swiffer sweeper pad!  Thank you Rosemary!}

If you haven't tried this technique of reusing your Swiffer in a greener way, I'd highly recommend it.  In just a few simple changes, you'll save money, reduce your waste, and use safer products around your home for yourself and your family!

Cloth Diapering Update - a Half & Half story

I recently chatted with you all on the blog about our cloth diapering troubles, the rashes we've seen lately, and the steps we've taken to alleviate all of those problems.  It's been a bit of a rough road, but I think we're finally in the clear and have figured out the solution to our diapering dilemmas.

After all of the steps we've tried, I've settled between using two products pretty frequently that are keeping the funk out of our diapers:

&

Images from Amazon.com

Basically, I've been keeping our wash routine similar to what I was doing before all of the crazy rash problems began by doing a soak, warm rinse, wash, and extra cold rinse.  What I've added is every 2-3 washes, I'll run the diapers in one extra wash cycle with either Grovia Mighty Bubbles or RLR, alternating each time.  This seems to have worked wonders for keeping the funk out of our diapers.

Side note: Dear teeny baby rolls- could you be any cuter???

Since I've implemented that wash routine, Little Lady has been back in her cloth diapers 100%.  Her daytime diapers, nighttime diapers, and hemp inserts have been working just fine with no problems whatsoever and no rash in sight.

Little Man, however, is a different story.  Since he is still extremely rash prone at this point, I've just kept him in disposables for the time being.  In his disposable diapers, he still comes up with a rash every week or two but I can usually catch it soon enough that it doesn't get too bad and I'm able to get some cream on it immediately.  Thankfully, he's gotten to the stage where a lot of the time now he is telling me immediately after he's gone and asking me to change him.

We tried a bit of potty training to see if he was ready recently, but at that point he didn't recognize when he had to go most of the time.  Little Man would go on the potty if I told him we needed to go, but he would never initiate saying on his own that he actually needed to go, and he also was having accidents and not even realizing that he was walking around in wet pants.  I figured at this point, it would be more of us training ourselves when to take him to the potty and not him realizing that he needed to go.  With Little Lady being so little at this point and requiring my attention at times, I can't see this working until Little Man is fully, totally, absolutely ready - and we're just not there yet.

I've thought a bit about putting him back into cloth, but since Little Man's rashes tend to get much worse, much quicker in the cloth diapers, DH & I are going to just keep him in disposables until he either stops having rashes or potty trains.  As much as I love our cloth diapers, I could care less about using them if they're making his bottom worse.

So, at this point, we're half and half in our household - Little Lady in cloth diapers and Little Man in disposables - and that's likely where we'll stay.

Thank you everyone who responded for sharing your struggles with cloth diapering with me when the initial post published.  It's interesting to hear that this seems to be a common trend around or before the two year mark for cloth diapering families.  At this point, I'm just really glad that we were able to get through over two years of cloth diapering Little Man, saving so much money and reducing our waste by a huge amount.  We'll also continue to use cloth on Little Lady as long as it works for us, which I hope can be for another two years!