No TV for our family of five for 1 year and counting |
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:
- What do you miss about television?
- What have you been doing with your TV watching time the last year?
- 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 …
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[…] a 30 day waiting period with zero balances and no TV for a year we are starting a new conquest in our household: life without credit cards. How long this […]
Pingback by Canceling all credit cards » Make You Go Hmm — June 21, 2007 @ 6:36 am PST
TD, sounds pretty successful! I’m a little too hooked on Survivor, CSI, The Shield, & The Closer to swear off TV, but we do typically watch more DVDs than straight broadcast stuff.
Re: your next “going without” conquest, rather than nixing your credit cards alltogether, why not try using them just like an AmEx - that is, charge all you want/need to, but never allow a balance to carry over into the next month. Dede & I have done this for years. We use our Citi Mastercard constantly because we rack up dividends points. They’ll cut you a check anytime you have more than $50 built up, for a max of $300 annually. We gleefully collect that max every year. BUT, we never, ever carry a balance, so we’re not charging anything we couldn’t just as well buy with a check or cash. Gotta give Dede the lion’s share of credit on this, however… she’s the financial whiz in our family.
Comment by Rob O. — June 22, 2007 @ 4:54 am PST
[…] 20, 2006: No TV for our family of five for 1 year and counting January 15, 2006: Review: Bye bye TV, hello […]
Pingback by TV comes back after 605 days » Make You Go Hmm — February 18, 2008 @ 11:59 am PST
If you play video games and watch dvds, you are completely defeating the purpose. Doing any of those three things- tv, video games, or dvds are bad after 2 hrs. Way to waste your year accomplishing nothing.
Comment by Josh — June 7, 2008 @ 10:11 pm PST
Seems like Josh was a bit harsh, but on a certain level I kinda agree. Now sure, you’ve sidestepped some big issues by not exposing your family to so much of the media crap & advertising that people who do watch broadcast television shows are subject to. But there’s a small kernel of truth to Josh’s comment that, regardless of what’s on the screen, TV time is still TV time. I dunno that I’d agree that any TV time over 2 hours is bad, but certainly even if you’re doing other things with the screen than watching broadcast shows, moderation is still key. Something tells me that you’re already on top of that though…
Comment by Rob O. — June 8, 2008 @ 9:12 am PST
Videogames test your hand-eye coordination. And there are exercise games like Wii Fit. I’ll agree with you somewhat on the DVD front, although you are going commercial free there so it reduces your time spent, but videogames aren’t passive.
Comment by TDavid — June 8, 2008 @ 9:18 am PST
No argument on the Wii stuff, David. Those (and the Guitar Hero & Rock Band stuff) are just about the only videogames I really get behind. My biggest issues with modern video games is that they are not now what they once were - the bad guys are no longer little green, squiggly, pixelated alien invaders. Instead, the bad guys who you’re out to gun down, beat up, or in some way kill, are ultra-realistic, breathing, bleeding human-like characters. They limp if you only graze ‘em. They yell out in pain. For all intents, they’re… people.
We have no tolerance for the idea of some terrorist gunning down people in the street - and rightly so - yet we’re perfectly fine with (often very young) children doing very similar horrific, mindless violent acts to video game characters? Sure, there’s some difference, but is there enough?
Now, if you as an adult want to play these gratiutously graphic games, well, sure go ahead. But far, far too many young children are getting wrapped up in these games and most often with nary a stitch of parental supervision, guidance, or discussion. Maybe young children can understand the difference between video game violence and the real thing, but that’s probably not nearly so likely if their parents never engage them in any discussion on the topic. There are guys at work who are quite proud of how well their pre-teen children are able to so effectively kill opponents in FPS PC games. I find that quite disturbing - and I find it odd that few if any of these dads encourage their little girls to participate in these bloodthirsty ventures…
Anyway, didn’t mean to Bogart this post and get it so far off-topic… Sorry!
Comment by Rob O. — June 8, 2008 @ 9:31 am PST
I agree with Josh’s last statement that you wasted your year, but I don’t think Josh did a good job explaining why. Dvds, video games, and tv are all imitations. They aren’t real life. We sit here and stare into a box and watch these various images that make us laugh, cry, and feel intimate with the characters on the screen. But the characters aren’t real, even if they are real, they aren’t apart of our real lives. Your life is the things that you do in the REAL world that impact the REAL world. Video games are getting so good at imitating physics and what it would be like to do a number of different thing,s but at the end of the day, all they are, are imitations. Your interactions with other real people in your real life should be what makes you laugh and cry and feel intimate. In response to you saying that video games create hand-eye coordination, so does bouncing a basketball around yourself or tossing a football. The only difference is that those are real things that happened in a real world with real people why video games aren’t real. So most, if not all, video games, tv and movies are a waste of time if you want to look at life from a holistic approach.
Comment by Steve M — July 17, 2008 @ 1:15 pm PST
Steve M - so you don’t see anything “real” about playing a game across the country with somebody else? I wouldn’t categorize all videogames as “imitations.”
Comment by TDavid — July 17, 2008 @ 1:54 pm PST
I still would. You should at least take a look at this from a different perspective. I raised around all this technology and entire belief system was based on how new gadgets and technology always make my life better. Then I came across this life shattering idea, like your no tv. I bet that you have seen a tremendous difference in your life. Yet consider this perspective. If you were able to watch yourself play video games what would you see? You would see yourself staring into a box. Inside that box are images of a make-believe world where you pretend to do real world things. If you play guitar hero, you did not really play a guitar. If you play madden 08, did you really throw a football or win a super bowl? No. Did you really kill someone and jack their car in Grand Theft auto? No. So it is ALL imitations. Now in rebuttal to playing with someone across the country, it is still not a real experience. You did not really play a game of football against each other. You imitated a game of football. What you did do was star at a box together. How is that interacting with one another. It’s different if you are in the same room- father and son and staring into a box together if you are actually talking to one another. Sitting there entranced in your own world, whether next to someone or across the country, is NOT interacting with other people or experiencing real events for yourself. Feel free to disagree. This is more about the conversation than necessarily proving you wrong-as I believe that you are a good person, like me, trying to live our short lives to the fullest.
Comment by Steve M — July 19, 2008 @ 6:45 pm PST