Here at the Baron household, we have a book entitled “Sam’s First Word Book,” a colorful collection of some 140 pages featuring a bunny named Sam. On each page are individual items such as a key, a door, a diaper, a puzzle, a camera and on and on.
Around their 3rd birthday, Zachary and Maggie Rose snuggled on either side of me on the couch to flip through the book for the zillionth time. Often, they correctly identified the picture. Sometimes, they were incorrect. On only one page, though, were they so stumped that they didn’t so much as venture a guess: the one depicting a TV and remote control.
That’s because you won’t find either of those items in our home.
Even above guiding our kids in spiritual matters, choosing to go without TV has been easily the single most formative decision we have made as parents. Fortunately, we made the break many years before they were born.
In April 1996, Bridgett and I agreed to pull the plug on our TV. That wasn’t a turn of phrase—we literally pulled the plug out of the wall socket because we saw it was interfering with our life. We were scheduling our lives based on “must see TV,” and that just didn’t sit right with us. We’d rather live life than watch someone else live it—and now that we have kids, that conviction has been an instrumental force in our parenting style.
We invest our family time in old-fashioned things like reading books, playing with blocks, putting together puzzles, playing hide-and-seek, running up and down the hallway, coloring, playing musical instruments, and “being rough with Dad.”
The irony is that most of my livelihood has been in the media and most of Bridgett’s has been working on movies and TV shows. But we rarely miss it. If I got an assignment for a major national story, and I had no clue about it, revelation was only a Google keystroke away. Bridgett rarely has seen major productions she’s worked on.
When people learn of our TV-less status, they typically have two reactions that could be boiled down as “Good for you! I could never do that.” and “How do you manage to function in everyday American life?” The latter question often has a self-justifying bent to it, as in: You’re freaky weird people who are sheltering your kids too much from “reality.”
Especially now that we’re parents, no TV means not having a potential “babysitter” that occupies the kids for long stretches while we go about our lives in some parallel universe. It means that we must engage our children more, speak with them more, play with them more. Physically and mentally demanding as that is, it’s well worth the effort.
Last year, when Bridgett did some part-time work on Fred Claus, she took the kids briefly to the office a handful of times. A few times she planted them in front of a TV as she tended to business. In as little as 30 minutes, they would turn into zombies, eyes glazed over and completely drained of energy. It redoubled our conviction that television—yes, even “good television” with wonderful, non-violent educational elements—is not good for them.
Neither, in comparison to all the other ways we can invest our time, is it much good for adults. So I challenge you to take part in National TV Turnoff Week, an annual event since 1995. But you need not wait until April...designate any upcoming week as your own version of this awareness effort.
For more information on our nation’s TV-viewing ways, visit www.tvturnoff.org. There you will find a wealth of information, such as this statistical dose of reality: the average American household has more TVs (2.73) than people (2.55).
Be assured that Bridgett and I lay no claim to full actualization. While we have successfully stiff-armed TV, a bigger hurdle is taming our desire to criss-cross the world of the Internet. Frankly, I don’t know how I’d go more than a day without it, let alone a week.