Our son is levelling up all over the shop. Out of nowhere, he’s discovered how to stand unassisted, how to sustain his babbling until he sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher and – in a semi-nightmarish turn of events – how to make his poo smell exactly like fermenting meat.
But, most life-changingly of all, he’s also discovered television. Our son has always been active – he broke one of my wife’s ribs before he was even born – and it’s been difficult to find anything that can settle him. It turns out that thing is television. The opiate of the masses is also the opiate of one very specific 10-month-old boy. Who knew?
This has created problems. Now he knows what the television is, he refuses to go to sleep if it’s on. And he’s started to shout back at it, so we’re forced to rely on subtitles, because rewinding key pieces of Doctor Who exposition every time our son barks vowels at Peter Capaldi is exhausting.
Clearly, we should exercise a little restraint. Not only will we have to stop watching the type of gritty dramas we did when he was an unthinking newborn – after all, we want to raise a baby and not a troubled cop with a drinking problem and a heart of gold – but it’s probably sensible for us to limit his exposure to it altogether.
Which isn’t to say that watching television is necessarily a bad thing. I watched tons of telly as a kid, for instance; so much that I ended up writing about it for a living. But my son won’t have this excuse when he grows up, because all the TV critics will have all been chased off the internet by furious spoilerphobes who send death threats to anyone who reveals what colour background upholstery they saw during a four-year-old episode of Game of Thrones.
For now, we’re only giving him a tiny daily TV window. And choosing how to fill that window has become a huge responsibility; especially as we’re watching this stuff together – I don’t want the TV to become a babysitter just yet – and my standards are high. I’ve already ruled out YouTube, for example, because the only baby-friendly videos I can find there are creepy, too earnest educational cartoons that I suspect exist purely to lure the vulnerable into a miserable world of fringe religious activities.
That leaves iPlayer and, specifically, Teletubbies. We watch it together because it’s the only show he visibly reacts to. He jumps when the characters first appear. He smiles. He waves. One episode contains a film about a hiccuping baby and, whenever he sees it, he’s rapt. It’s unprompted empathy, and it’s astonishing to watch.
This is our little routine. Whenever Teletubbies begins, without invitation, he crawls across the room and up on to my lap. When we’re sitting quietly together, I actually feel like a proper dad. I’m not simply tending to his basic needs. This is something he wants us both to do, something he enjoys.
This is the exact thing I imagined when my wife first told me she was pregnant. And there’s only going to be more of this; more things he’ll want us to experience together, until he becomes a teenager and decides he hates me. It’s embarrassingly banal to admit, but watching television with my son – seeing him get lost in a story, feeling his breath rise and fall against me – has become unbearably precious. It’s everything.
Plus it’s the only time he lets me cut his nails, so there’s that.
