Wow 4 kids! Guess you didn’t have a TV in your bedroom either!
I have 3 kids and they all had TV’s in their bedrooms (although probably not quite as young as the OP). We also have several TV’s throughout the house and have never limited anyone to how much they can or can not watch. They also have computers with internet and iPhones.
My oldest would normally be a Senior in HS, but graduated early with a 4.67 GPA so she could attend a prestigious Jesuit University on full scholarship (combination athletic and academic money) and finished her first semester with a 4.0 GPA and was the top scorer on her team (NCAA D1) in the spring season. She is in their pre-med program. She is right now attending a tennis match to watch her friend play.
Next is a son who is a Sophomore. He has a 4.26 GPA and plays for a Major League feeder team. He is being recruited by several D1 schools. He is torn between Medicine and Engineering. He is currently at the library studying with friends.
Youngest is a Freshman and only has a 3.89 GPA (he has dyslexia so we’ll give him a break). He plays lacrosse on the top team in the area.
They all do/did volunteer work, and have been class officers and been involved in multiple extra curricular activities primarily focused on helping other students.
So, yes TV rots their brains and you should avoid it at all costs. Your kids will amount to nothing.
Oh, yeah… we have a DVD player in our van. Kids used to judge how much longer the trip was by how many Barney episodes they could watch.
I didn’t get my own TV until I was about 9, and it didn’t have cable/satellite (we didn’t get it until I was 13 and it was expensive rural satellite that was only for the main TV). And these were the days before online game consoles, so I’d eventually get sick of my single-player games and VHS tapes and wander out to where the people were! 
We didn’t let the kids have TVs in their rooms, and they didn’t have computers either, until my younger daughter talked us into letting her get a laptop at the beginning of her junior year in high school. Even then, we didn’t have a wireless router until she was a senior, so she didn’t have internet in her room - she could type papers, but there was no chatting or Facebook unless she came downstairs into the public space.
We did finally put a TV in my older daughter’s room. We snuck it in there while she was away at school, so she couldn’t complain. It’s been used a couple of times to watch old VCR tapes or play N64 games.
I don’t believe that watching TV or plying games is automatically harmful to children. However, as someone who talks a lot to parents who are having problems with their children doing poorly in school, I’d say that the kids with unrestricted access to TV, computers, and game systems are unlikely to improve their school performance if they aren’t doing well.
Well, something is rotting my boy’s brains. 
One thing’s for sure - it’s a lot easier to go to having electronics in your kid’s room than going from it once it’s there. So from that POV alone, it would be a no from me.
One thing I like about having all the electronics in one room - it’s a lot more social. We’re medium-slack about the whole “screen time” thing, but at least when we’re all together in the computer room, even if everyone’s doing their own thing, we’re aware of what each other’s up to, interacting sometimes, giving advice (well, ok, sometime that’s a problem 
I really think there’s a bit of either-or thinking going on in this thread with which I disagree. Putting a TV in your child’s bedroom only equals a net increase in total screen time if you have for some reason decided that house rules govern only what happens outside that bedroom.
My daughter has a TV in her bedroom. She also has guidelines regarding how much television she can watch, and these apply to all of the TVs in the house put together. The television in her room means that when television-watching is an allowed activity, it can be at her (and our) convenience. Is she sick, and wants to crash in bed for the day watching the Disney Channel. Done. Would Mommy and Daddy like to watch that archived episode of Modern Family while the baby is napping and our daughter would rather watch Good Luck Charlie for that particular half hour? Easy.
There are many comments in this thread that seem to suggest that the mere existence of a television in a particular room dictates something about how it will be used. The TV is a tool, and we use it as a tool. We put our tools where they will serve us most conveniently, and then we decide when to use them, and when to not.
Again, though - this is something that you can control, no matter where the television(s) happen to be.
Because I don’t have a webcam in my daughter’s room, so how will I know how much TV she’s watching when she’s on the other end of the house from me?
No tv bedrooms. But that just works for us, I am a total control freak on channels and volume and duration in front of the tube.
Also, tv’s can topple off a dresser, speaking of toppling, make sure a tall dresser or changing table is screwed to wall. Climbing toddlers can bring that stuff down
Heh. That’s fair, I guess. I mean, I have a pretty small house. My daughter’s bedroom door is probably only about fifteen feet from my usual spot in the living room. So keeping a vague eye on what she’s doing isn’t hard. I guess with a bigger house, it might be more of a problem.
But I still maintain it shouldn’t be that much of a problem. If my daughter’s in her room and we tell her “no TV,” then if she gets caught with the TV on, she’s going to lose the TV. She knows this, has always known this, and so far we’ve never had an issue.
Try programming a video recorder sometime. That skill seems to elude most adults I know. Kids have a better chance of learning it.
That actually happened to my oldest niece when she was, oh, maybe three. She was alone in my mother’s bedroom, watching tv, and pulled the tv down off the dresser. We heard a crash and ran in. Happily the tv had hit the floor, not here. She waited until everyone was assembled before she started crying.
Programming a DVR is not what I’d call a meaningful skill, and the AMA study someone linked to upthread pretty much encapsulates my wife’s concerns about having a tv in the baby’s room, particularly while she still IS a baby.
Sigh. Being able to navigate a crappy user interface is neither electronics or programming. But it is a very common attitude these days. My daughter’s CS 101 class (at a good school) consisted of rlogin, sftp, and use of other low level applications. The closest it came to programming was cutting and pasting a few simple JavaScript segments near the end of the class.
I have 3 children, ages 7, 4, and 3.
They do not have TV’s in their bedrooms but for my hockey obsessed 7 year old I set up a digital receiver with a 7" monitor in his bunkbed. (He rarely makes it past the 2nd intermission).
I’ve not even thought about whether I would allow it when they are older but I suppose I may allow it. Of course, its use would be monitored and if there were a problem it would be removed immediately.
As far as your wife preventing the TV becoming a babysitter or your daughter being hooked on electronics …errrr…good luck with that… and welcome to 2013.
I’m having trouble understanding what it means to be “hooked on electronics” in the modern day. Hands-up, Dopers: who sees a dichotomy between being on the computer and social interaction, such that the former is necessarily in lieu of the latter?
That said, I barely pay more attention to the TV when it’s on than when it’s off, so that may skew my perspective.
We have one TV in the house, though many other media devices like iPads, laptops etc. The kids don’t have a TV in their rooms but are allowed to take one of the other devices into their rooms during their 30 min of allowed screen time each day.
Others may have different kids - but for my two if any screen-based media is on in the room they are fully zoned out on it. None of this “Ignoring it in the background” stuff. And they will watch for 8 hours a day straight given the chance.
The Firebug turns 6 this summer. There has never been a TV, computer, or DVD player in his bedroom. Hell, we rarely turn on the one TV we have. He watches a small portable DVD player in the living room, which works well for us because it doesn’t dominate the living room, we know what he’s watching, and there aren’t any commercials except for other kiddie DVDs.
No. My daughter is 7. I don’t really let her watch much TV, and she doesn’t seem to care at all. In any case, she would prefer to play video games when she is allowed “screen time.”
When she’s older, maybe.