Bad Side Effect to Good Parenting

I know my kids have way more than when I was a kid.  They have more toys, more house, more clothes, more activities.  They also have more of mine and my husband's attention.  We are constantly talking about our parenting and what we want to do and how we want to raise our kids.  We are very purposeful and have chosen to avoid corporal punishment.

We really don't want our children watching too much television and we've been pretty good at limiting it.  For that reason, taking television away has become a great punishment for bad behavior.  Much of what is on television is highly inappropriate for younger kids and even commercials can be questionable, so we've gotten in the habit of never watching "grown-up" shows while they are awake.  Today I discovered that by only watching children-appropriate programming that our kids choose, we have inadvertently taught our children that they control the television. 

Last night my children were out of control and as a consequence they lost all television privileges today.  Unfortunately for my children, their radio and CD player are in the same room as the television.  They love to blast their music and dance and today they wanted to dance while their grandpa wanted to watch television.  Because they were not allowed to watch television they had to leave the room and could not dance.  Boy were they ticked off about that.  They did not understand why grandpa didn't have to turn off the television so they could dance.  They yelled and screamed about it for about 20 minutes.  It was really pretty ridiculous.  I told them that grandpa was our guest and he could watch television whenever he wanted to and all they could respond with was, "but we want to dance."  They just could not fathom why they weren't getting their way.

I know children are all self-involved, but I promise you when I was a kid, changing the channel or turning the television off when my grandfather was watching was punishable by a severe butt-whooping.  That fear was more than enough to keep us from complaining.  The events today have got me thinking that our gentler way of disciplining our children has made them less aware of other people; especially now that I stay home.  My daughter is just home for the summer, but my son is with me all day, every day.  He doesn't have to share with 10 other kids anymore and he often has my undivided attention.

This is an overstatement, but some how our choice to limit our television viewing has not taught our children to care for other people, but has caused them to believe they are the center of the universe.  I'm not sure how we're going to work on this problem, but it definitely deserves some attention.