My daughter Ellah graduated from kindergarten. A large community of family and friends gathered early on a summer evening in the kindergarten room, painted with soft, pastel colors. All the dolls neatly tucked up in bed, all the tiny kitchen cups and saucers, plates and pans, stowed in their small wooden cabinets.
The children and their teachers, sitting within a concentric circle of adults, embarked on a medley of kindergarten songs, which have been part of their work and play for the past two years.
Starting with memories from their first year of kindergarten, when everything was still new, they visited, through song, seasonal landmarks that became so familiar as the Earth turned and they all grew to be second-year-kindergarteners, who showed the ropes to their younger mates.
Remembering Nature's Changing Seasons
Journeying from autumn to winter, from spring to summer, the children sang their favorite songs. We all remembered the pumpkin seeds planted at a field trip to Meadow Song Farm, where the children found jewels from the fairies, hiding in the little holes where they each placed a seed.
We brought back memories of the lantern walk on a chilly evening, the children carrying handmade paper lanterns, each shining with a candle flame, like a long line of gnomes lighting the dusk. We recalled the cold of winter, when the children walked around a spiral of evergreen boughs, each lighting their candle in the darkest time of year.
We re-visited the delight and anticipation of spring with: Spring is coming said the bumble bee/ how do you know said the old oak tree/ I've just seen a daffodil/ dancing with the fairies up on yonder hill… We remembered how, after a long summer, autumn returned with its harvest of pumpkins at our yearly field trip to Meadow Song Farm. The very seeds that the children planted grew gigantic, providing a beautiful crop for our harvest celebration of giving thanks.
The Kindergarten Graduation Ceremony
A vivid musical and poetic picture glowed in our imagination as the children completed their musical stroll down memory lane. Then the adults were asked to go out and line the path going downhill with parents and friends. A volunteer carried a basket full of rose petals, of which we each took handfuls… Hush came over the chattering adults when the children and teachers appeared at the top of the hill.
One by one the children walked down, between two rows of teary-eyed parents who paved their path with rose petals, singing a soft song of doves, whose time has come to leave their nest…
At the bottom of the hill awaited the first grade teacher. Presenting each with a long stemmed rose, she gathered the children into the first grade classroom, where they will spend their school days after the summer break. There, she told a fairy tale that spoke (as most fairy tales do) about a long journey that is being embarked upon, and about the courage and magic each little voyager is equipped with, for the road ahead. The parents awaited in the yard, arranging a yummy display of the finger foods we all brought, to close the evening.
The memory of this evening will line my daughter's dreams for years to come.
No sitcom character, nor TV ads, will disturb her inner landscape, as she integrates the images, sounds, movement, song, magical beings and real friends that inhabited this evening. No commercial input competes for her attention.
Life Without Television
Our school, dedicated to enriching our children's souls with natural beauty, is asking that we refrain from electronic media exposure.
Living without TV - 'the box' - allows for Ellah's world to enfold amid a selectively chosen backdrop: primarily that of Mother Earth; the changing seasons; the planting of seeds; the gathering of petals and branches which she makes into fairy houses with her friends; the harvest of blackberries, apples and pears, which are made into pies; the gathering of marigold and onion, whose petals and skins are used at kindergarten for dying silk capes, which the children wear on birthdays and daily dress-ups.
How would all this magic pale and crumble in front of Dora the Explorer? How would these etheric forces be trampled by the coarser broadcasted images?
A friend of mine, whose family also lives without a TV, reports of her daughter being stunned when playing with her cousins, each of who consumes a hefty media diet on a daily basis. The cousins seem to be limited to playing-out characters from TV series, re-enacting stories they've watched on screen.
Little Nadia, who has no reference for these, is the only one who creates worlds from within: a blue silk is a river, on which a fairy boat, made of an open walnut shell, is sailing.
For me, it is comforting to know that when Ellah goes to play-dates with friends from her class, they are not sitting and "veging" in front of TV. Not everyone at school is committed in exactly the same way, though.
Some families with older children can't help the younger ones from being exposed to what older siblings are watching; single moms at a point of collapse send their child to sit in front of the screen, so they can have a moment's rest; two fighting siblings may stop when offered to watch TV, allowing mom to cook dinner rather than constantly mediate between them; and the list goes on.
Our kindergarten teacher notices the difference when characters such as Harry Potter creep into children's play in the kindergarten yard.
She has called a special parent evening where she spoke about the effect the media has on her work. She described how her gentle fairy tales are being bitten down at the yard, by tree-branch weapons made by children who imitate what they watch on the screen.
It was a moving plea and many parents, whose commitment to no-media was flexible, spoke later of wanting to tighten their media practices only because they realized how it interferes not only with their own child, but also with the whole circle of kindergarteners and their work.
What I notice with my 7-year-old TV-free daughter, and our media-free family, is that we spend time together doing meaningful work and joyful play, that Ellah's imagination is vivid and never-ending, that her observation of nature and its subtle changes is a continual source of delight, and that her picture of the world is that of a beautiful, trustworthy, and ultimately a good place to be in.
To see a video interview with DeAnna L'am, author of Becoming Peers: Mentoring Girls Into Womanhood, visit our video page by clicking here http://www.eolife.org/videos.php