Watching Videos as a Sunday Morning Tradition?

Preparing for Mass with a Holy Heroes Adventure Guides Video

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It might seem odd that we, a family that consciously limits screen time for our children, have been making a habit of watching videos each Sunday morning.  Yet it is true. 

For weeks now, some time between breakfast and Mass on Sunday mornings, we bring our laptop to the table and let the kids glue their eyes to the screen.

Why?

Because we have found Holy Heroes Mass Prep Videos like this one:



Each Sunday, the Holy Heroes Adventure Guides offer a free, short video.  These help center our children's attention on the Gospel and, on good weeks, encourages them to pay more attention in church as they listen for the readings shared in the videos to be repeated during the celebration of Mass.

SPD Connection

In keeping with my promise to honor National Sensory Processing Disorder Awareness Month this month, I wanted to make three notes about videos and Mass with our son.

1.  Videos.  Our son LOVES them and would gladly watch them for hours on end.  However, he is also often over-stimulated by them.  As you can glean from the photo at the top of this post, where our son is standing with his hands behind his head, our son tends to watch videos with his whole body.  He often stands, jumps up and down, wiggles and bounces.  Plus, since he was quite young, during particularly stimulating segments of videos, he often reaches his arms forward and open and closes his fingers almost as if he is trying to repeatedly and quickly manipulate a puppet's mouth.  (This, as we learned in the past year, is actually a stimming behavior.)

2.  Heavy Work.  Regardless of whether a video causes our son to stim or not, we have learned that if our son is to remain regulated and if we are all to remain more peaceful, we have to bracket his video viewing time with active time.  When we fail to ensure heavy work (running, jumping, lifting, pushing and other activities that work the proprioceptive system) before and/or after screen time, our son's dysregulation quickly becomes apparent.

3.  Pre-Mass Strategy.  Mass always goes better when we take the time to encourage our son to have more than just a quick with a good dose of heavy work.  When we budget 15 minutes or more for heavy work activities before Mass, we usually discover his behavior at church benefits. If only we would remember to do this more often...

What special treats or favorite traditions have become a part of your family's Sunday mornings?

 

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