We just cancelled our TV service. Our TV however, retains its position in the corner of our family room.
With four young kids, I understand the appeal of digital entertainment. How did our ancestors manage without?
There are also days where I see it sucking the soul out of our society, accelerating the looming health care crisis, and I wish we would collectively toss them out the window. The dangers of too much screen time are well documented and should be heeded, but the topic of this post is not about limiting your screen time. (For a great article on this topic, read “How to Limit Your Child’s Screen Time“)
Here’s our approach to managing square eyeballs, I hope you’ll mull it over and consider making a “digital entertainment game plan” that works for your family.
Education Over Entertainment
We aren’t anti-entertainment, or anti-technology. Among our indulgences are a Nintendo Wii, a couple Nintendo DS’, Apple TV, and games on our iPhones. Entertainment does have a place in our family, but it is behind education and self-propelled outdoor pursuits.
Similarly, we believe that the World Wide Web, accessible only via digital screens, offers tools for information and idea leverage that make it worthy of mastery, not avoidance. Likewise, it is incumbent on all decent Dad’s to remind you that gaming can make a better world.
Our issue is with TV programming.
Growing up, my family cancelled our TV service for a good chunk of my high school years, and I didn’t miss it. Especially the repetitive commercials. When I moved away, married and started a family, I didn’t feel the need or desire to have it … so we didn’t.
That remained the case until February 12, 2010: the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics. Our oldest son was old enough (7 years old) to catch the Olympic fever and it spread to the rest of us quickly. I tried to access the opening ceremonies online but it was glitchy and I was unsuccessful. Wanting our family to be inspired by the world class athletics, it was a justifiable gateway to the world of TV programming, and I was excited. The next morning I called the local service provider and there was digital cable and a PVR installed pronto.
This turned out to be a great decision, and watching the games on the edge of our seats every evening with my oldest son is a memory I’ll never forget. I was also pleasantly surprised at the quality of educational programs available for young kids on networks like Treehouse, and CBC Kids.
The thrill quickly subsided as I realized that the TV advertising world had not changed in the 15 years since I last lived with TV, and I was once again subject to the same commercials over and over. This blatant disrespect for people’s time and attention is outrageous to me – the fast-forward feature compliments of my PVR helped, but its still damn inconvenient.
It appears the masses are still happy to plunk 8 minutes of their life into the slots of this noisy machine with blinking lights every half hour. At least with a traditional coin slot machine, you have a slight (very) chance of scoring some coin back in a win. This advertising machine will never return a single minute, and will continue to operate as-is until their is no longer incentive to do so. Hence this post.
The final nail in the coffin of our TV service was the stream of materialistic messages relentlessly targeting our kids during the commercial breaks of their favorite programs – even educational programs that we had approved of.
The effect was noticeable immediately as our kids began targeting US with the messages. Dinner conversations were dominated by requests for all the latest toys, and the birthday/christmas wish lists grew exponentially. What little contentment we had managed to preserve living in our possession-obsessed society was quickly disappearing.
There are many great TV programs, movies, and video games for kids and adults alike, and to cut yourself off from all of these works of art (which is what they really are) because of the corporate greed & disrespect of advertisers would be a shame. Thankfully, there are services like Apple’s iTunes, which allow you to consciously choose which programs you allow your family to be influenced by.
Which leads us to our family’s current approach to entertainment: we’ve eliminated the TV programming, and have allocated an entertainment budget for the family to spend every month on iTunes. This ensures we are actively involved in choosing our programming (a TV left on in the house leaves this choice to TV marketing execs), and we are not subject to the mass market advertising messages.
Here’s what our “digital entertainment game plan” currently looks like, and it hasn’t changed much over the last couple years. Our mileage varies and sometimes the hours trend upwards, but sometimes we also go for stretches without any when life gets to busy for it.
Like compromises you make in your diet, junk creeps in, so it is good to revisit your goals and make sure your daily intake will support them. Keep in mind that any tv show, game, movie, or website that makes it into the house has already been pre-approved because we believe it will add value to our family.
How do you do it in your family? How do you WISH it happened in your family?
31 Tasks for Growing SuperFit Families!
“Sunny and cooperative, the children were every parent’s dream. No culture can ever have raised better, more intelligent, more likable, more confident children.”
These compliments are written by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas after living with the Kalahari San, the last surviving hunter-gatherers, in Africa. She is not alone in these observations of these preserved hunter-gatherer cultures – what is their secret?
3 significant cultural differences stand-out in
Read more »
Last week after 18 hours of fasting I had an extreme craving for bacon! My family will laugh because 1 year ago, I would not have been caught dead eating bacon. I had already planned to make chicken so I decided to put the two together. Here’s what I came up with, simply add a days worth of hunger to taste it like we did!
Read more »
Growing superfit families requires continually improving performance across 10 physical skills. You will be thrilled to discover that these skills do not need to be developed in a gym: they can be developed through play, as a family, in your backyard. Here are 5 pieces of equipment that will develop these skills, are addicting for the whole family to use, and can be found for dirt-cheap.
Read more »
1 Comment