As much as this embarrasses me to admit, I watch a lot of television.

I'm the kind of person who tends to flip it on when I get home, make dinner, and then settle down in front of it for the rest of the night.

Sometimes I reflect nostalgically on my single days when all I owned was a tiny little box with rabbit ears and a VCR. Most of my nights were spent out on the town or in front of my laptop, pounding out short stories for editors to reject.

Now that I'm married and moving through the inevitable stages of married life, I've been talking to my hubby about how we want to raise our kids. And inevitably one of the first things we both agree on is that we don't want to expose our kids to TV too early and we will definitely limit their viewing time when they get older.

What we don't ever discuss is reducing our own viewing time. The disjoint between the ideal parents we envision ourselves being, and the reality of our actual sorry selves, is already becoming apparent and we don't even have kids yet.

All I know is that watching television makes you stupid and while I have progressively lowered my expectations of myself in the last few years, my hopes for my kids remain, unfairly, high.

It makes me want to move to the forest when I read that 40 per cent of three-month old children and 90 per cent of kids under two regularly watch television and DVDs. Okay, so "regular television viewing" means 40 minutes a day (that's about eight "You ARE the fathers" on Maury) but still.

Developmentally and personally, TV viewing is basically dead time for both babies and parents. Even though 29 per cent of parents polled said they believe television and DVDs were good for their child's brain, according to the American Academy for Pediatrics, a child under the age of two should not be exposed to television.

Teletubbies be damned.