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We recently filled out an application for a pre-school, and it asked how many hours of television my daughters watch in a week.  I felt instantly defensive because it seemed like the question was a value judgment, no matter how we answered.  Unless, of course, we answered zero.

But, my kids do watch television.  Yup.  It's true.  They watch television shows, tapes/DVDs of television shows and movies.  We even check shows out from our local library.

And guess what?  I watch with them to make sure all the shows are appropriate, and my husband and I don't use the television as an electronic babysitter.  So there.

My three-and-a-half year old daughters have learned a great deal from watching television.  Djuna recently taught me what a blue morpho butterfly was.  She learned that on Diego.  And, recently, both of my daughters have been excited about picking out a topic, say, giraffes, and asking if we'd like to learn "all about" giraffes.  I think they are mimicking Elmo.

We also read truckloads of books.  We even got flagged at the library the other day for trying to check out too many books.  And we got flagged the week before that for trying to check out too many books by a single author (it was Beatrix Potter).  So even though my girls are happy to pretend to be Dora, they are also just as happy to pretend to be Olivia the pig or Gerald the giraffe, from books they've read.

I have even recently been thinking something radical: maybe the film version of a story is an entree into the text version.  Dinah and Djuna have been enjoying the classic animated Charlotte's Web.  They play Wilbur, goose and Fern all the time.  (And on one crazy day last week, my husband called me at work to tell me about the funniest thing that Djuna did at the playground.  She perched herself up on a platform on the play structure, leaned over and then bent her elbows up to look spidery.  As kids came up the platform stairs, Djuna would look right at them and say, "We live a little while, and then we die," just like Charlotte the spider.  Then the freaked out little kids would scurry away, but the Djuna-spider would stay put to greet the next victim to climb into her web.)  Suffice it to say, I don't think the movie has harmed their imaginations at all.

Because of their familiarity with the story, in fact, I can hold their attention with the actual full-length novel, a little bit at a time. They are even starting to understand that some books are divided into sections called chapters.  They also like the idea that we are reading a very long book and like to see how far we've come.

As with anything else, television, in moderation and balanced with other forms of entertainment and story-telling, is not a wicked thing.