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A Week Without TV


turned off television.JPGThe last week has been an interesting one for my family. Why? Because we shut off the TV completely. And it’s been fascinating to observe the results.

Here’s how and why it happened.

As one of the editors here at Plugged In, I know that research indicates  that television is simply bad news for small children. But as the father of three of them (ages 4, 2 and six months), I’m also aware that sometimes TV is  an easy go-to crutch—even though I know better.

Which is to say, we’ve watched our fair share of Dora the Explorer and Go Diego Go, Super Why and Garfield. Generally, we try to limit exposure to two half-hour shows a day. But sometimes, especially on stressful days, it’s easy to give into the temptation to watch more. And sometimes that happens.

In that sense, I suspect our TV viewing habits are probably pretty normal. We try to set boundaries and limits. But we don’t always enforce those with the greatest of consistency.

A couple of weeks ago, though, our 4-year-old, Henry, began having pretty significant sleep problems. Henry’s slept through the night regularly and without help for several years, so it was quite a shock when he started wandering into our room to tell us he was scared. At 12:30. At 2:30. At 4:30. After a couple nights of him being up two or three or four times or six (!) times, we began to probe the source of his newfound fears.

And it turns out it may have been something that he saw on an episode of Scooby Do, of all things, something that unfortunately slipped into our programming mix in a weak moment.

So, we decided there’d no more Shaggy and Scooby in our house for the time being. But we also saw it as an opportunity to take it one step further and just take a break from TV altogether. And so we did, mostly. A few minutes of news one morning and a bit of one NFL playoff games were the only exceptions in the last seven or eight days.

The results, while not dramatic, were nonetheless pretty intriguing.

The first couple of days were pretty difficult, frankly. The impulse to watch TV as a passive, ingrained habit is not easy to give up, cold turkey. And though I wouldn’t have said our family was addicted to TV, trying to turn it off and keep it off was hard to do—perhaps suggesting that we’re more hooked on the medium than I wanted to admit.

But after that initial withdrawal, we soon found that we were talking more. Playing more. Playing more board games. One day, I read my kids Bible stories from their children’s Bible before heading to work instead of trying to distract them from their early morning television shows (such as Super Why on PBS).

Perhaps more importantly, my kids seemed, well, happier. There’s been a wealth of research that indicates television programming is really pernicious for small children, that it actually increases their unhappiness. And, anecdotally, I have to say that it seems to be true. They’ve just been livelier and less irritable with the TV off.

I think another bonus has been a boost to their creative endeavors. Not only are we playing more and reading more, we’re also doing all manner of childishly crafty things together. Drawing. Cutting. Painting. Making paper airplanes.

All in all, it’s been an interesting week. The benefits of shutting off the television have been readily apparent.

In theory, we should have been able to make this choice because we knew it was the right thing to do. In reality, it took a crisis of sorts for us to take what is, for our culture, a fairly radical step.

In the name of full disclosure, Henry began sleeping better and we turned on the TV again last night. Guess what: Henry was up three times in the night, and the TV is back off for now.

I can’t tell you if and when we’ll turn it on again. I suspect our TV ban won’t be forever, nor am I prescribing that kind of disengagement for everyone else. (After all, the Super Bowl and the Oscars are coming up, right?)

All I know is that shutting off the TV has revealed some important things about our family, our habits and the influence of this influential entertainment medium. And I sincerely hope and believe our week without TV will permanently reshape our attitudes toward it, even when it does come back on with a bit more frequency.