Rob from 2Dolphins was curious how our family has been doing without television. We’ve now been without TV for 365+ days (you can follow along with a counter on the left sidebar on the homepage).

Let’s start with the kids.

The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that children in the United States watch about four hours of television every day. They recommend that children under age 2 should not watch any and older children should watch no more than 2 hours a day of quality programming.

Our children are older than that, but thought it was worth shoehorning that into this piece. I’ve broken this up by each member of the family and asked the following questions:

1. What do you miss about television?
2. What have you been doing with your TV watching time the last year?
3. How much would you watch TV if we got it back?

14 year old son
1. Nothing.
2. Watching DVDs and playing Xbox 360.
3. Not as much as I used to (couple hours a day before).

15 year old son
1. Nothing.
2. Video games.
3. An hour a day while eating.

17 year old son
1. No. I don’t care.
2. Playing WoW.
3. Not much. I don’t know maybe a couple hours a week.

Mother
1. Lifetime and background noise late at night.
2. Reading more books.
3. Not sure.

Me
1. Being able to follow some TV series that aren’t yet available online.
2. Watched more videos online. Started creating more of my own videos.
3. A couple hours a week, maybe.

There are a few shows I’ve missed. We tried to catch the FOX show 24 on the official Fox Myspace site but it was clumsy. 24 has been renewed for two years.

VoIP + internet + TV = $99/month deal
You’ve probably seen or heard about the deal Comcast is running. While nobody in our family is that interested or excited in getting TV back we are considering getting VoIP in our home again instead of using Skype as our residence line. The Skype experiment has gone poorly. When we asked Comcast about adding only VoIP to our account they told us the cost would be about $6 a month less than having all three using the triple play deal.

Downside of the triple play deal? TV would only be hooked up to one room. Even though the cabling is there for all rooms, the would only connect to one TV. It would be an additional charge to hook up to all our TVs. This is what annoys me about the cable company. They are kind of like the phone company in that they nickel and dime you over stupid little things. Look, the cabling is there, it’s a matter of screwing in a cable at one location versus another outside, it’s not like running all new cabling around the house which I’d fully understand being charged additional.

It’s the little things like these that remind me why I don’t want to increase our monthly bill and get TV again. Yeah, maybe it’s only another 6 bones, but those extra bones start to add up. Will we make it another year without TV? Maybe.

What will be our family’s next “going without” conquest? We’re thinking about axing credit cards next — all of them. Stay tuned as the going without days continue …

• Shrinking TV audiences forcing networks hands?
• Built my first Google Homepage module
• Valentines: 80 years of marriage
• Warning the Blogrush is on and isn’t degrading gracefully
• Breaking into Prison Break
• Any Ironside fans in the house?