Barney

I'm learning to let go.

I'm one of those parents who, in addition to inappropriate or useless TV shows, wanted to keep annoying shows away from my kids. That means Barney, Teletubbies, Boobah. Tobey doesn't watch that much TV to start with so I limited his programs with "my" favorites, Thomas and Mr. Rogers when he first started watching TV. More recently, Tobey seems to also like Jay Jay the Jet Plane and Blue's Clues and some random shows we've seen once like the Backyardigans.

But Barney is the unfortunate poster character for annoying kids shows, the overly enthusiastic kids are just unnatural to me. And the constant breaking out into song isn't really my style of programming. But alas, Tobey wanted to watch Barney today so lucky for him, ever since Tom upgraded our TiVo hard drive, TiVo filled up our 80 gigs with all sorts of programs including Barney. So he's watching it right now.

I asked Tobey how he knows about Barney, as if I'm interrogating who gave him illegal drugs. "Riley and Kelsey", which means he watched it at couples group at Joshua's house. I suppose it could be worse. He could be coming back pretending to play with guns and mentioning about killing. Oh wait, he does that too (not from couples group, but from school and particular playmates).

So while there's much to teach about guns and killing, there's really nothing wrong with Barney except for being annoying. But the notion of annoying is not really something I want to introduce to Tobey, the notion of what's "cool" or "in" and what's not. For all I know, Barney IS in at his age. Plus, the kids on the show seem to be so expressive and articulate, maybe that's a good example for Tobey.

But someone smack me if I buy Barney stuff or put Barney in our TiVo season passes.