Interview: Why Tanya's quitting parenting TV

It's been a year since we last spoke to her, but things have moved on a lot for TV's Dr Tanya Byron. She's written a new book and her comedy TV show with Jennifer Saunders launches on the BBC this Autumn. Here, she tells Raisingkids.co.uk why she's moving on to pastures new and what made her decide not to film any more parenting programmes.

RK: You're currently promoting a new DVD series product, 1-2-3 DVD. There are 12 titles in this range, is one of them a particular favourite?

TB: Ice Age is a fantastic film. The twelve titles are good and a lot of the films have a nice message whether it's about the environment or history, but for us it's definitely Ice Age. I remember my son said to me when he was about four – 'Mummy, you're a very shrewd mammal'. I thought my child is genius until I realised it was straight from the movie.

Parents are always being warned against too much TV – what are your views?

Well, I'm strict in the sense that my kids (Lily 11 and Jack 8) have a certain amount of time and that's it. But the truth is we live in an age where television is part of our environment and it can be a positive or negative influence depending on how we as parents manage it. That's the same for anything – do you let your kids eat sweets or play computer games?

There are a lot of parents out there who get terribly anxious about things like this. But I think you know me, my view on anything to do with parenting is for parents just to relax and not to feel they have to fit a certain prescriptive way of bringing up their kids. There's a lot of that going on right now – parenting has become so popular as a genre.

So is television OK in small doses?

The truth about television is that it's there – parents use it as a way of entertaining their children, they use it as a way of enjoying time with their children and also – if we're honest – parents use it as a way of keeping their kids occupied while they're trying to do other things. And I'm not going to be all moralistic and clinical and say 'it's terrible and not what we should be doing, because that's not how life works.'

What about the expert who said that children under 3 shouldn't watch any TV?

I think any statement like that comes from a research perspective and is useful in that it gets people to think about the issue. But the reality is that you have to balance all this sort of stuff against the reality of your life. I do think television is used too much as an electronic nanny and I do think that some children are left in front of the television all day every day and that's wrong.

But I think there are some programmes on TV which are very educational for children and do help them learn things in a different way and if parents think about the programmes their children watch and how they might interact with their children when they're watching it, that's a good thing.

Is it a question of balance?

Under the age of three when they're linguistically, cognitively developing at a huge rate, if the majority of what children do is watch TV then that's not a good thing. They have to have a multi-sensory, developmental experience and watching TV is one aspect of that, but reading books, going outside and climbing trees, running in the mud, making collages, counting on their fingers with their mum and dad, singing songs and so on are all part of that experience so there has to b a balance.

Are parents being given too much advice and information?

Well I've just written a book which is going to be published in September called Your Child Your Way. Last year a number of publishers all asked me to write a parenting book and I didn't want to write another parenting book. But I've written a book that deconstructs the notion that there is a right way to parent. And I feel it's going too far – parenting's become a well-marketed product and that's why I'm not making any more parenting television programmes. I'm making different ones now from the BBC.

Are you taking a break or is that really an end to parenting programmes for you?

I'm not doing any more parenting programmes as a clinician at all. I think it's important that parents find their own way with their children that advice is helpful, but you need to trust your own instincts. I do still do one day a week clinical work and I find a lot of parents come to me feeling completely disempowered, because there's a lot of advice and they don't know what to use.

For me personally, I don't want to do any specific parenting programmes is that the ones I've made I'm proud of, they were well made and well researched and really helpful to the families and you know we follow our families up, but as far as content goes, I've done as much as I'm comfortable with doing on television with familes and I think the genre was moving into an area that I didn't want to be part of – a much more well marketed area.

Is that because all the parenting advice has become so prescriptive?

Well, you could say that about me. I'm prescriptive as a clinical psychologist, but I've always tried to balance that with 'make a decision and make a decision for the rest of your life'.

It sounds like you're enormously busy at the moment. What do you do with your kids when you get a free moment?

My daughter and I like to write together – we do a lot of creative writing together. She'll start a story and write a couple of sentences and leave it on my bed at night with a pen and then I'll write the next part. And then we go to the cinema, and the theatre, we also do a lot of outdoors stuff – we hang out just like any family actually.

We heard you're writing a TV show with Jennifer Saunders. How did that come about?

I met Jennifer when she and Dawn asked me to be on their Christmas special in 2005. They're both amazing women and I became friends with both of them, but particularly Jennifer and I would meet and just hang out and have a laugh. She's very interested in psychology and a real observer of people as you can see from the stuff she's written.

One day I talked to her about a character that I thought she'd be really good at, a chat show host like Oprah, Jeremy Kyle person which I'd written myself as a creative writing piece about three or four years previously. I sent it to her and she liked it so we wrote it up and pitched it to the BBC and they gave us money to do a pilot, which we did, and we've now shot the series which is in the edit at the moment and is going to be on air in September. It's called the Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle.

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