Look.

My daughter spoke a new word last night: "Look." And I found this worrisome.

What's the big deal? Any 22-month-old child can handle one-syllable words, and most (including Piper) have far more extensive vocabularies. My issue was the way I know she came to discover this word. She came to it via the television, albeit indirectly.

The Tournament of Roses Parade is a longstanding New Year tradition for both Laura and me, dating back to our respective childhoods. I remember waking up in various southern California households in which my family lived, always feeling the refreshing start-overness of January 1st, and running to the television to turn on the parade. I often slept through the early start of the parade. It was no trouble finding it on the television: Every local network affiliate and many non-network stations in southern Cal cover the parade live.

Then, as now, I loved the floats the most. The marching bands were fleetingly interesting. The various horseback brigades were downright boring. I would invariably lose interest long before the parade was over, and by 10 a.m. I was looking for other stuff to do. Barely hours old, the new year was beginning to feel an awful lot like the old year. The Rose Parade is just one of many examples of how having a child lets me to re-live my own childhood. Piper was too young to watch for more than a few seconds last year, much less appreciate it. I expected this year to be an "improvement."

A few things have changed since I watched the parade as a kid. It has become much more overcommercialized, with many floats' corporate sponsors using flowers, grasses, and natural foodstuffs to exploit (to greater or lesser degrees of subtlety) some aspect of their company. Luckily, a work-around appeared last year when the cable channel Home & Garden TV began covering the parade (sans commercials!) with intelligent broadcasters avoding the corporate America shill with product-placement voiceovers. HGTV's folks talk about the materials that made each float and the arduous work that goes into creating them.

Another change: Now I live in the central time zone, so my (and Piper's) rising at 8:30 yesterday morning meant we still had an hour-and-a-half to kill. (Dad: Prep work on the evening's feast. Piper: "Watch Elmo?") The most exciting change by far is my ability to TiVo the parade and skip the damn horses. Time for a little overdue media justice, Mr. Palomino!

"Look, Piper!" I exclaimed. She was busily watching her Bitty Baby doll's eyes open and close as she rotated it from a vertical to horizontal position. I tried to ignore the wearied, practiced expression she had on her face as she lifted her head from her activity to look at the TV. I said "Look," and she looked -- not at me, but at the television. She studied the screen for a moment. I made some comment like "Do you see the lion?" in an overly excited voice, and she said "Yep," and went back to her Bitty Baby. Just another year.

Later that night, as I was hurrying to finish the hoppin john, the kale with red pepper and parmesan, and the yeasted corn bread, Piper took one of her running tackles into my knee, screaming: "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!" And when she had my attention, she pointed back to the living room and said: "Look!" I was at a critical point in my cooking, so my friend Ed went instead to view her completed puzzle achievement, but as I reheated the kale with olive oil, I asked Laura, "Have you ever heard her use that word before?" She said she hadn't. "How did she learn that?" I wondered. And then a moment later: "Oh my god. I tell her to look at the TV all the time."

When Laura was still pregnant with Piper, we discussed many issues regarding not only logistics of a new human being but the philosophies behind raising it. We agreed on almost everything, but I was awfully quiet when Laura made suggestions about television habits. Her radical take was that she wanted the television gone, period. More generally, she wanted a much less time spent in front of it. Her one demand was that certain shows with a good deal of violence -- Oz, The Sopranos, and NYPD Blue come to mind -- could not be watched when Piper was in the room.

I mentally shuffled my feet about all of this. It's not that I didn't agree with her; I just couldn't imagine letting many of those shows go. And yet, there HAS been a reduction in grown-up TV time. I had some help: Oz finished its run, and a couple of other shows were cancelled. (Frasier will end soon, and I can't imagine Dennis Franz hanging in too much longer with his stale show.) But I also made a concerted effort to not pick up new shows last fall. Lo and behold, my 30-hour TiVo has a lot of space on it. It's kind of nice.

But Piper still "atches Elmo" (she's not too good with her W's yet) and occasionally catches a Teletubbies episode. We limit her TV watching to an hour or so a day. What's scary is the trance she goes into. You've seen it, even if you don't have kids. I ask her a question and she may as well be deaf. She has disappeared into Elmo's World.

In a lot of ways, I feel like in my life I "look" more than I "act." I don't want my daughter to be like this. I mean, she's clearly pretty sharp: She completed every one of her puzzles yesterday afternoon, and some of them are rated for 5-year-olds. But the "Look!" episode last night got me thinking a lot about steering my little girl toward a life more active rather than passive.

My mother-in-law is fond of reminding me regularly that the best teaching method for Piper is by example. Maybe more television will go by the wayside in 2004.