Reading the TV

About the time spectrum son turned 
four,  spectrum dad became convinced 
we should always display the closed 
captions for the hearing impaired
(is that right? closed? why not open? 
or is it close captions?
In which case why not far
-as in I watched from afar?)
(I shall digress in blue today)
whenever we watched tv as a family. 


I had no objections, spectrum son 
had no objections, and so we have 
little words at the bottom of the 
tv screen all the time.


Result 1 His dad thinks he learned to read faster.


Result 2 Meltdowns when the words 
don't match what is said-turns out 
captioners usually go for the gist, 
or sometimes just make mistakes.


Result 3  My son cannot focus on any 
video without subtitles.


I have mixed feelings about all of this.
Videos of books often offer a 
read-along option, so obviously 
people think there's some educative 
value there. But my son is way 
past that stage. Whether because
of subtitles or otherwise, my son 
is an expert decoder. He just doesn't 
understand what he reads. Maybe 
without the captions he would pick 
up better on other visual cues.


Plus the library has some vids&dvds
without captions I want us to watch.


We watch several different book 
video series, one of the oddest is 
Nutmeg Media, which packages
a single book dvd with educational 
material. 


We liked A Mother for Owen, 
which I checked out 
from our library. 
Presumably you can also buy that 
dvd if you'd like, but not from 
Amazon which gives me this
image for that title:

In case you can't tell, that's a tortoise 
mothering a baby hippo. 
This really happened.


Which I guess puts any tiny 
differences between parents 
on one side of the 
spectrum and children on the 
other side into perspective.


-Spectrum Mom