I didn’t have a TV for 10 years until last year. I did a lot of reading - online or offline. In your case I’d suggest games. You’re going to have to spend more time with your child and that can only be to her good. And if you need some time away, hire a babysitter.
I have a TV, but I don’t watch much. I can’t get anything but one proprietary (really shitty) cable company here, and dish is not an option, so nothing but network TV for me. To be honest we watch DVDs of TV shows like Family Guy but once I’ve seen them that’s about it. Sometimes the TV’ll get turned on when I’m eating, and I use it to play DDR (video game). We had a TV while I was growing up, but I’ve never been the type to just veg out in front of it.
IMO there’s nothing wrong with TV unless you find that it’s causing you problems. Personally I don’t think reading is all it’s cracked up to be. I like nonfiction books and stuff like Biography and History channel, but I can’t see that much difference between reading a storybook and watching The Simpsons.
I’ve no plans to ever have kids, but as far as kids and television… I’d say less than the educational aspect, it’s probably good to limit kids’ television because I think they’d be better off doing something constructive. Learning, making crafts, interacting with peers or family, getting exercise, imaginative play. That would be beneficial.
In my experience, life without television depends on how much hobbies you have and how good you are at entertaining yourself. Some people go nuts, some people never miss it.
I love watching TV as much as the next person but have found that I adapt well to not having one. Sure, internet use increases, but so does quality time with family members, reading and slightly earlier bedtimes. My son is 5 and also enjoys watching TV when he is in other people’s houses, but he accepts that we don’t have one at home and entertains himself in other ways. I’m sure that as he gets older peer pressure will lead him to question the absence of TV at home.
As long as the actual TV’s not there I doubt your little girl will miss it much. Just have a plan for when she gets bored and starts wandering around the house like a torpedo in search of a target.
I was pretty much a TV junkie when I was a kid and then went without when I was in college and the first few years after. Total of about seven years. There was always something to do - study, rehearsals/practice, listen to music, hike, bike ride, read, go to movies (when I could afford to do so), party, and so on. I didn’t miss it much, except on rainy days when I didn’t want to go outside. Like Rodgers01 said, it was way too easy to get back into but I’m nowhere near the addict I once was.
Maybe later on you can arrive at some sort of middle ground. I like it when my girls (both 2.5 years old) have their favorite movies and characters and songs they like to sing and dance to (although they do that without the TV as well). They get terribly interested in the computer, too, so maybe this would be a good time to get your girl into that, if you can find a way without destroying a computer in the process.
Thanks for all the replies!
We turned off the Direct TV about 2 months ago thinking to limit our watching that way - but now we are watching DVDs much much more.
I agree there is some good stuff for kids on TV but I hate how it is so central in our lives now. And I admit the issue here is more about my inability to tell the daughter “no” rather than her controling the TV watching. I’m simply not able to achieve moderation.
My vision of the perfect role for TV in our family is a regular Friday event of a movie and a pizza. And off otherwise. But it is so easy to just turn it on and flop there together and kill an hour or more for no good reason.
Daughter is just getting into the computer now, and I am encouraging that for sure - it is still screen time but educational I hope…
Thanks again.
This is how the TV was most of the time I was growing up. I think my parents did a great job, and I’m planning to take the same approach when (if) I have kids. We spent a lot of time reading together, cooking together, and playing board games.
Use to watch tv only about a hour a week. Just to catch up on the weather. Last 2 months tho I’ve turned on my tv once/twice. Absolutely nothing appeals to me on network or cable tv. Reality Shows, Medical Shows, and Cop/Lawyer shows all done to death and just rebranded. If you count reading on the internet/messageboards as “reading”, then I probably polish off a couple books a week.
It’s very difficult to talk about this without sounding pontiffical. I know I’m going to come across sounding as a snob. But you asked for our opinions, and these are mine. Everyone else’s MMV.
I’ve been TV free for about four years, now. I occasionally rent DVDs and watch them on the computer, but rarely and never alone. I consider watching TV alone as much a danger sign as drinking alone. It also means I can skip past any commercials.
I seriously felt minor withdrawal symptoms upon first giving up television – especially irritation and bursts of anger. I kid you not. Later, an issue of one of the science magazines – Discover maybe? – mentioned this in a context of experiments on people giving up television. So it seems to be fairly common.
Of course, I was one of those people who was an extreme TV-watcher, raised on it and thoroughly addicted. I don’t think my roommate, whose TV intake was restricted, was as seriously affected.
I read a lot more. I think my attention span is gradually coming back, and my imagination, too. I get my news entirely in print – cyberprint and good old paper. I find I’m a lot less tense, nervous, scared, apathetic, more likely to look forward to the future. I don’t know nor care what’s fashionable and who the celebrities are – which is a major plus. I feel much less driven to buy things I don’t need. Virtually all my entertainment expenses are books, manga, and eating out with friends.
I’m still somewhat net-addicted and video-game addicted. But video games end (or at least the ones I play, do) and are interactive. And the net is mostly text, involves human interaction, and my addiction there goes in cycles (some months I can hardly be bothered to check email, other months I lose whole days to it). I also find both to be more rewarding.
And neither has the frightening passivity, the monolithic political and commercial agendas, or the droning, unchanging continuity I associated with television.
I have no children, and I know it’s difficult for parents to remove television from their lives entirely, but I believe I would try to severely restrict its intake. Being a person raise don television myself, I know it’s not healthy…
My parents divorced about 1980 or so. I was going into fourth grade. Dad kept the color TV. Mom kept a tiny B/W with rabbit ears. I haven’t lived in an all-TV household for 25 years.
My friends used to talk about shows they’d seen, and start conversations like, “Hey, did you see _________ last night?” My answer was often simply, “I don’t watch TV.” My friends learned not to ask me those questions. Nobody that I recall ever made fun of me for it, but some people did ask, “Jeez, what do you do?”
And I’d tell them. I read a book, I wrote a story last night, I drew a picture (here, want to see it?), I built a fort out of fallen tree limbs, I rode my bike, I programmed on my computer (a VIC-20), I played pinochle, I did my homework (did you?). Why, what did you do?
Nothin’, they’d say. I watched TV.
It wasn’t a problem for me, growing up. Occasionally there was something on TV people talked about that I wanted to watch, and if I could get reception for that channel, I’d haul out the B/W TV and try to get a glimpse of it. I caught the pilot episode for Star Trek: Next Generation that way.
Instead of TV my family had activities planned. One night a week was Family Night where we’d all get together and play a game (often cribbage or pinochle or Dictionary). We never lacked for creative stuff to keep ourselves occupied: writing scripts for our adventures and recording them on audio tape for later, complete with cheezy sound effects.
No problem. It can be done, and without meaning to sound too preachy, I think I came out as a more observant, alert and creative person than many others of my acquaintance who were TV junkies. I’m not saying TV rots your brain, or all TV watchers are idiots, but TV is a seductive force that must be used judiciously and with discipline. After 25 years I have got used to a house that is quiet all the time.
I grew up with seriously restricted television viewing rights. We were permitted to watch an hour a day, and two hours a day on weekends. The TV could not come on before 5pm (sometimes if mom went to the store, we’d sort of post a lookout so we could watch a rerun of “Love Boat” or “CHiPs” – yeah, we were sad creatures). Mom and Dad would often decide that “Wonderful World of Disney” or “Wizard of Oz” or one of those would not count against our TV time, so we watched those sometimes as well.
What did we do the rest of the time? I don’t really know; it was before the internet (waaaay before), and really even before personal computers. We didn’t have Atari even.
I do remember that we played a lot of games. Candyland when we were younger, Scrabble when we got older. And tons more; the game closet at mom and dad’s house was stuffed full of board games. Or we played shipwreck, if mom let us take the sofa cushions off. Or we just made up games.
These restrictions were lifted when we were in high school (not by decree, the parents just stopped noticing). Now, I like TV; when I have free time and feel like vegging out, I’ll park myself in front of it. But in the last month, I’ve watched TV maybe twice, and watched DVDs maybe three times. It’s just another leisure activity to me. I don’t know whether that can be attributed to how I grew up, or whether that’s just how I am. My sister watches more TV than I do, and so does one of my brothers. But not much more. So who knows? Maybe it helped get us off it.
Until I was 13 (1950), my family had no TV and life was quite different. Of course, we listened to the radio, but it was not nearly as compelling. We talked a lot, read a lot and I played outside on the street incessantly. After we got the TV (as a matter of fact, I paid for it with my Bar Mitzvah loot), most of the family drifted into the habit of watching TV all evening. Oddly enough, I didn’t. I enjoyed reading more. Eventually, I went to college (as a commuter) and then I spent very little time at home and hardly ever watched. After I finished school and eventually married, I had no TV for the first four years. Then we got a TV, mainly to watch hockey having just moved to hockey heaven (aka Montreal). It is still that case that I hardly ever watch anything but sports, mainly baseball and curling. I am revolted by the ice-boxing that hockey has become and all the clutching and grabbing also turned me off. (I am aware that they are trying to control it, but I bet it reverts come playoffs.)
Our TV went bust on around 9/8/01 and a repair shop came and took it off on 9/10 and brought it back on 9/12. We therefore missed the carnage and I think I am better off for that.
All in all, it is not that I am against TV, but I just don’t enjoy the programming and would still rather read a book.
I’ve had various periods in my life when I had no TV. Usually if I got annoyed with my cable company or something. There’s been periods when I’ve gone two or three years without watching. On the other hand, there’s been plenty of times (including now) when I do watch TV regularly.
So here’s my two cents: it doesn’t make any difference in your life. If you’re wasting time watching TV, you’ll just find other ways to waste that time. If you’re looking for interesting things to do with your life, TV is just as good a place to go looking as any other. How you live your life is determined by how you live your life.
Growing up, we had a crappy old TV and no cable. I watched an occasional cartoon (my parents tried to keep that to a minimum), PBS, and Star Trek with my dad (let’s just ignore that last bit).
As a kid, I read a lot. I also did all the normal kid things, coloring, playing with dolls (okay, action figures, but let’s skip that like the Star Trek thing), stuff like that. I’m not a parent, but I bet that once the wee ones get used to TV not being an option, they’ll just replace it with less mind-glazing things.
I really like your attitude, clairobscur. I get really miffed when people get sanctimonious about TV, because I grew up watching tons of TV and reading tons of books, and I think I’m a pretty intelligent, accomplished, critical person. Didn’t rot my brain.
Anyway, one thing I’ve noticed since my husband started watching TV (he didn’t have one before we got married) is that TV is something that you can do together! We have a couple of shows that we watch together and talk about a lot, plus–the evening of the show, we know we’re going to spend a whole night together. Dinner, show, then talking, then more talking about other stuff, you know. Not all show-related, but it’s a reason to have a “date.” Many nights, he’s got homework and I surf the Dope, but a common interest that occurs weekly is really nice. Mr. Frail writes fiction, so he’s got a good critical eye for stories and such, and a lot of television shows these days have intriguing, well-developed plotlines and characters. It’s kind of like reading a book together and talking about it, once a week. (FTR, we also do that. I mean, read books together and discuss them.)
Overall, when I didn’t have a TV (college), I found other ways to waste time, and I sometimes felt like doing something that didn’t require energy or socialization…so I missed TV. When I have kids, moderation will be the law, but I don’t see why getting rid of the TV is a good idea unless you really don’t want it.
Between surfing the Internet, rushing for assignment, doing homeword and fooling around with my computer, I don’t watch TV anymore. But I do spend a lot of time on the computer- if I am home, you can bet that the computer will be on the moment I wake up to the moment I turn in for the night.
Or it could be just that I don’t have cable, and there’s really nothing interesting on. I bet I could watch Discovery channel for hours and hours.
I think it’s great that you’re trying the one-month break. If you’re addicted, personally I think it is good to learn that you are addicted. Then, you can choose to fight it or not. As an addiction, I think it’s a lot like caffeine. Not illegal, doesn’t get you stoned, sometimes provides a slight advantage, but sometimes results in grouchiness and sluggishness.
That said, if you have ever given up caffeine, be prepared for similar symptoms. Plan to eat well rounded meals, get exercise, get enough sleep, have a balance of with-people time and alone time, etc. so that you aren’t placing yourself under additional stress.
Maybe plan a few special treat activities for when you get a craving. If your daughter has a few favorite shows that you think may be trouble spots, plan alternate related activities. “No, we’re not going to watch Sponge-Bob on TV today. Today we’re going to make Spongebobs out of kitchen sponges and pipe cleaners.” Or if your husband loves to watch sports, plan to catch a local high school or college game with some friends one weekend.
Between ages 6-10 I was limited to 90 minutes a week, then we got rid of a TV until I was 14. I lived in homes where there was a TV from 14-22, but by that time the habit was pretty much broken in me. I didn’t own a TV from 22 to 29 when I got married.
I keep meaning to get a bumper sticker “No one on their deathbed ever wished they’d watched more TV.”
You read and watch
the computer!! :smack: