NOTE: This is the first installment of a 4-part series.
To follow the series, make sure to “LIKE” my Facebook page.
I know what you’re thinking: “here’s another hippy, stick-eating family trying to force their do-gooder, no TV, “let’s play board game” crap on the rest of us.” We’re really none of that. We’re a normal, TV loving, DVR subscribing, Super-Bowl watching, “run of the mill as much as we can be” family. (We have a DVD system in the car, we’ve been Netflix subscribes for 10 years, and we regularly rent from Redbox.) There are five of us,
and we all have our favorite shows. We believe that TV is not only fun, it also good for us in that we laugh together, discuss what we watch, and often learn cool stuff from TV. We also noticed some other things… We all watch quite a lot of TV – several hours every day really, especially when you tack on watching movies during commute, Netflix streaming and impromptu RedBox rentals. And truth be told this does keep us from doing other things we also enjoy, like reading, playing together as a family – inside and out, riding bikes, doing hobbies and cool experiments. We WANT to do all this other stuff, but it always seems easier to sit down on the comfy couch and turn on something, anything, as there is always something to watch with 100 channels and a fully-loaded DVR. TV has become the family default, and it keeps us from doing all kinds of other worthwhile activities together. Beyond spending a ton of time watching TV and not doing other great things, we also noticed that TV-watching changes our kids’ sense of satisfaction, contentment, creativity, and need all change in relation to how much TV they watch. This is probably true for us as well, though we’re less aware of it. When are kids watch their favorite shows, they become more disrespectful, they want more stuff, and they grow less content and less creative with every passing hour. We noticed this really by accident. Our oldest son loves watching TV, and when he gets in trouble a frequent consequence is to restrict his TV watching. This year one of his punishments has been to restrict him from TV for the entire weekend. This has been initially crushing for him. But on the weekends that he lost TV, we began to notice something very peculiar: after then initial grief wore off, he was happier, more creative, more active, more cheerful, and more productive than on the weekends that he got to watch TV. And when our oldest son loses TV privileges, his two younger brothers’ watch less TV, and they are also more creative and content. Hmm… I wonder if this would work for us all…
The Plan
So what happened when our family gave up watching TV for the month of February? For the next few weeks, I’ll be posting the results of our little experiment, along with my thoughts on the meaning and impact of TV on our lives. Why February you might ask? Well, it’s the shortest month. Also, not watching the Saints is not an option.
