This is a collaborative post
One of the things that I love about the kids getting older is that their screen time is more interesting to me. We love family screen time now.
I didn’t love to sit and watch Peppa Pig or In The Night Garden with them. I mean, it was lovely to see how much they enjoyed watching their favourite shows, but they didn’t really appeal to me!
Now that we have a teenager and a tween, we can watch TV shows and films that we all enjoy together and family movie nights and season bingeing is lots of fun.
People will say screen time isn’t great, but for us, I rate it as it’s good family time. We all enjoy our films and shows, and it’s fun to share them together.
Rest assured, the kids are still playing games, listening to music, taking part in sport, enjoying their hobbies, getting out for walks, reading books and chatting with their friends. As are us adults. And we then enjoy the TV.
We are that family that subscribes to several TV streaming platforms, and I’m happy that we do make the most of them. We can find most things that we want to watch on one of these, though I know we can also choose to use a VPN to access some shows streamed elsewhere, you can click here to learn more about doing that.
We’ve fostered an enjoyment of films in the kids since they were little, because we like them so much. They’re entertaining, educational, creative, imaginative, and sometimes, completely absorbing.
We like our trips to the cinema too and take the kids regularly as they enjoy it. The Husband and I can pretty confidently say that if a film was a cinema hit from the late 90s to mid 2000s, we’ll have seen it. We were at the cinema most weeks before kids!
We’ve long held family film nights most weekends, and they’ve gradually moved on from the likes of Frozen, High School Musical and Madagascar (oh, the amount of times I’ve seen these films!) to action packed films or comedy movies. Although, don’t get me wrong, we still like to dip into those types of films, too. My daughter chose to watch Encanto just recently and we watched Tangled straight after that. These films have no age limits.
We like to think we’re ensuring they have a good pop culture upbringing, and we’ve watched most of the favourites from the 80s with them, from Back to the Future to Indiana Jones to the Karate Kid. Our children know their films!
Family film nights are usually films we will all enjoy, and then my daughter and I will watch musicals and romcoms together as she likes those and my son and I like to watch sports films and underdog stories as he enjoys those.
When it’s not film night, we can enjoy TV shows that us adults like too.
We’re enjoying The Big Bang Theory at the moment. We watch it every evening, two or three episodes, and it’s a bit of family time together. We’ve watched Friends and the kids love that, they really liked Wednesday, and we’re just discussing what we’ll move onto when Big Bang finishes as we’re on Season 11 now.
My girl and I have watched shows like Stranger Things, Schitt’s Creek, New Girl and we are making our way through Brooklyn Nine-Nine at the moment, it’s an easy show to dip in and out of. We’ve also just made a start on Gossip Girl and are settling in for several seasons of that.
We tend to watch these things together when the Husband and my boy are watching sport together, usually football. Their sporting screen time is important to them and my son happily watches practically any sport so there is always something to tempt him. This is where we do need to be aware of restricting screen time, otherwise he’d manage to find some sport to watch all day every day!
It’s fun having this time together. The kids get excited to watch things with us and it’s nice to get cosy in front of the log burner, under our throws, and settle in for a bit of family time this way.
There are many posts talking about how bad screens can be, but everything in moderation, right? We wouldn’t be without our films and shows.
Are your family fans of movie nights and TV season bingeing?
Disclosure: This is a collaborative post