Turn Off Your TV Week

Every year, there are two weeks of vol­un­tary TV Turnoff Weeks. April 19 launches the first one for this year.  Is any­one else par­tic­i­pat­ing? Fam­i­lies with young chil­dren are the real tar­get, so I’m sure most adults that are out­side of the Mommy and teacher cir­cuits haven’t even heard of it.  Grownups could ben­e­fit from it, too.  We all can be over-connected and use this in as a chance to clear out the noise and recon­nect with life out­side of a screen.

Lazi­ness is the great­est of the virtues that tele­vi­sion can teach us. A lit­tle veg­ging is good and relax­ing, but in gen­eral, Amer­i­cans are way over­do­ing the couch potato act. Phys­i­cally, we’re becom­ing more inac­tive, and watch­ing the TV is about as seden­tary as it gets.  Nope, get­ting up to get a soda or some chips doesn’t count as activ­ity, sorry.  Imag­i­na­tions are actu­ally sti­fled when some­one else does all the think­ing for us.  Chil­dren learn very lit­tle socially from watch­ing char­ac­ters on a tele­vi­sion inter­act.  Even the best qual­ity pro­gram­ming is no sub­sti­tute for actu­ally liv­ing life.

Another per­va­sive rea­son to watch out for the tele­vi­sion is how cut­throat the com­pe­ti­tion is for your child’s influ­ence over your pock­et­book.  Chil­dren are extremely impres­sion­able.  I can’t tell you the num­ber of times I’ve been begged to order a Bux­ton Bag, so I can remem­ber — “but­ter, milk, eggs.”  Like I don’t already have my own home­grown mock­ing­birds to repeat the same phrases over and over to me.  “No, Mama, you NEED a Bux­ton Bag, it will make you so much bet­ter!”  Sigh.  Many kids shows are noth­ing but half hour long com­mer­cials for over­priced plas­tic toys that sit in the toy box, wast­ing away while the kid watches the commercial.

Per­son­ally, I am bored with a lot of cur­rent tele­vi­sion pro­gram­ming.  Most of my tele­vi­sion series or movies come to me through my Net­flix queue.  While I adore Net­Flix, that queue is even lim­ited to one DVD at a time. I don’t have pre­mium chan­nels on my cable, and we only have one tele­vi­sion in the house.  I am still guilty, just the same.  My own screen time is spent on the com­puter, and usu­ally Mommy’s com­puter time lines up just right with the boys’ tele­vi­sion time.  No, I won’t give that up entirely over the week, because blog­ging isn’t estab­lished firmly enough as a habit for me to com­pletely cut off the com­puter.  I still will be pulling back a lot that week, and set­ting strict lim­its.  Being a good exam­ple is impor­tant, of course, but really, I’ll have lit­tle choice.  The kids will be bored and ask­ing me to enter­tain them.  There won’t be room in my brain for read­ing arti­cles, con­stant social media, play­ing online games, email­ing friends, and whiney voices.  Some­thing will have to give.

We’ve done this week break before, and after the ini­tial with­drawals, it’s actu­ally very good for the fam­ily.  Hope­fully we’ll all read some books, do some fam­ily fun stuff, and get some much needed exer­cise and sun­shine.  After about seven days, we’ll be all nice and detoxed and a lot less depen­dent on screen time to enter­tain us.    I’ll be excited to catch up on my shows, espe­cially Sur­vivor, but then I’ll be dis­ap­pointed at Heroes again.  When we get back to plug­ging in, hope­fully we’ll be a bit more con­sci­en­tious and mod­er­ate in the way we frit­ter our time for just a lit­tle while.