I’m Doing Proper Dad Stuff With My Son – Watching TV

Our son is levelling up all over the shop. Out of nowhere, he’s discovered how to stand unassisted, how to sustain his babbling until he sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher and – in a semi-nightmarish turn of events – how to make his poo smell exactly like fermenting meat.

But, most life-changingly of all, he’s also discovered television. Our son has always been active – he broke one of my wife’s ribs before he was even born – and it’s been difficult to find anything that can settle him. It turns out that thing is television. The opiate of the masses is also the opiate of one very specific 10-month-old boy. Who knew?

This has created problems. Now he knows what the television is, he refuses to go to sleep if it’s on. And he’s started to shout back at it, so we’re forced to rely on subtitles, because rewinding key pieces of Doctor Who exposition every time our son barks vowels at Peter Capaldi is exhausting.

Clearly, we should exercise a little restraint. Not only will we have to stop watching the type of gritty dramas we did when he was an unthinking newborn – after all, we want to raise a baby and not a troubled cop with a drinking problem and a heart of gold – but it’s probably sensible for us to limit his exposure to it altogether.

More at theguardian.com.