' TV CELEBRATING TO ' : PARENTS ESSAY

! MILLIONS BY millions years of Parenting Honours ! !WOW! asks just one question : '' What have you done OR imparted to your child for Mankind? ''

YES, I feel guilty when I plop my kid in front of the television. That's why I plop myself beside him.

All my parenting programming taught me that TV equals bad. When I was a kid, my mom found an article with the headline [ '' TV Kills Brain Cells '' ] in the inside of the kitchen cabinet as a message to us all.

Later, when I'd read '' Amusing Ourselves to Death '' by Neil Postman. I dutifully avoided consuming passive content for fear that it would catalyze an unshakeable sloth on, at best, ruin my vocabulary.

I can't imagine saying to my son that TV kills brain cells, but I do think it - or fear of it. Our language might have shifted [ today we talk about rotting ], but the notion endures that watching too much TV and other visual content is detrimental for kids or at least has a whiff of moral failing .

It's an offshoot of the logic that childhood should be programmed to the hilt and that you're sabotaging your prodigy's future by not equipping him or her with prepubescent fluency in Mandarin or a firm handle on quadratic equations.

In these moments of self-doubt, in lieu of parenting books or mommy blogs, I like to turn to the writing artists who are also parents.

In her 1982 memoir, 'Daybook : The Journal of an Artist, '' the sculpture Anne Truitt reflects on visiting the Saihoji Temple's gardens in Kyoto with her children.

On its paths, she recalls, they would "play games with scale, wandering in the multifoliate greens clinging to the soft mounds of earth as if in great primeval forests that tangled and roared over our heads" - a description that made me feel guilty for letting our membership to the botanic garden lapse.

But it was something else that Ms. Truitt wrote that convinced me of the value of watching "Paw Patrol" with my son:

Her experiments with scale, she wrote, drew her "attention to the intervals between events, to what is happening when ‘nothing’ is happening."

Watching TV with my son has, for us, become that time when "nothing" is happening. What’s valuable about those minutes is how much space they leave for spontaneous connection.

When my son and I watch TV together, we build a shared language together.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if it’s TV that other parents deem actually good or TV that makes us a little dumber because it’s not really about what we watch.

It’s about how watching together lets us bond with each other - and teaches me about my son.

The World Students Society thanks JO Anna Novak who is the author of most recently '' Domestirexia : Poems '' and other books, and she writes How To Watch TV With Your Kid, a newsletter about Parenting and Culture.