Taking a timeout -- but not just from TV

We moms will take back-up from wherever we can get it. So when Pediatrics journal says that kids who watch TV or play video games on weeknights do worse in school, you can bet we'll find some way to weave it into the dinner table conversation.

But to be honest, TV is sometimes the easiest foe I fight in the war for my children's time and attention. The tougher fight is against all those activities that offer great benefits but come at a cost of family time, private time, creative time and sleep -- the things that in some perhaps-unquantifiable way also feed into academic and intellectual growth.

Those activities include sports practice, homework, even social time for high school students who work so hard at academics that they have little time left for the great -- and fleeting -- pleasure of hanging out with friends, decompressing from the day, sharpening their great adolescent humor and sometimes even their thinking skills.

My kids don't spend hours each evening sitting in front of the TV, but many of their evenings are consumed by the day's homework or simply eaten up by a school performance, a sports practice or a school event. I sometimes dread things that should be fun -- a roller-skating party, practice for the church Christmas play, a school musical -- because I know it will throw the week even further out of kilter. And it's not like my kids are signed up for a million activities -- we scaled back on classes and extracurriculars several years ago.

But here's what I still fight to make time for -- what I genuinely believe makes my kids not only better students but better human beings: conversations about events of the day and how human beings make productive and unproductive decisions; a chance to talk about what each of us aspires to and offer encouragement to go after it; a chance to share successes, fears, doubts and pain; great, rambling creative talk, where my son tells me how he would design a new Lego or my daughter talks about what she loves about Shakespeare and hates about Hawthorne.
Making a space for that on most weeknights is a whole lot harder than simply turning off the TV.