TV Free (Mostly) -- One Month and Counting

For the last several months I have thought over and over about shutting off the satellite service to our television.  This would be a bit of a lifestyle change for us because we live far enough from major broadcast areas that we would not have the ability to receive any live television programming at all.  Now I know that there are several people out there who have managed to get by just fine without television.  It wouldn't be the end of the world if our access went away.  But for me I have always found the television to be a source of comfort for me, whether I was watching anything or not.  Just having that background noise made me feel more secure and safe.  Weird?  Probably.  But it just is what it is.  I can't explain it.  It just made me wary to take any steps to turn off our satellite access. In addition, I felt as if I would feel cut off from the world if I didn't get to watch the news every day.  I didn't want to miss anything important that might be going on in the world.

But a few months ago I started to get fairly irritated with the things I was seeing on television.  I actually have gotten to a point where I don't really watch too much television at all any more.  It was mostly the news, but presidential election politics highlights the very worst of broadcast journalism.  It was irritating me to see how the media (and by the media I mean all sides of it -- left, center, and right) was sensationalizing everything.  I could hardly stand to see any of it.  Every single story seemed to be chosen based on how tantalizing it sounded rather than whether it was true or relevant to anyone's life at all.  I was much more content to surf the web to get my information and make my own informed decisions based on that.  Suddenly the television news didn't seem all that important to me any more.

Then there were my children.  When we were first married we lived in Springfield, and we relied on our television antenna to get the local channels, and that was it.  Laney and Savannah got to watch a bit of PBS each day and maybe a video tape of a Disney movie.  That left lots of free time to do other things.  When we moved to Waynesville we couldn't receive those channels any more, so we signed up for cable.  We still only got the local channels, so nothing much changed except that the pictures were clearer.  Yea!  However, a few years after we moved here the cable company decided to double the cost of their local tv package so that it was now about the same price as satellite service.  I couldn't find it in my heart to pay so much for only local channels, so we made the switch to satellite television.  And wow!  So many channels!  So many programs I had never seen before.  It was pretty exciting. 

And our kids discovered Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel.  They were in heaven!  There were programs for little ones and programs for pre-teens.  There were programs that appealed to everyone, and they were available 24 hours a day.  They were in heaven.  If I were a perfect parent I would have severely limited the time that my kids watched television.  But as I have established in previous points, I'm not a perfect parent.  In some ways we did try to limit things a bunch, but frankly, I so often found myself in so many places that the limits weren't always enforced.  I wish that we could self-regulate, but it just wasn't happening.  More often than not, this was how I would find my children:

Not the best situation, to be sure.

So something was going to have to change.  I was starting to notice that the younger bunch of my children were not the avid readers that my older children were.  I assumed that that might have something to do with their almost unlimited access to mindless television shows.  I don't really have any particular issue with the shows they were watching.  Although I say that the television watching took too much time during the day, we were still very strict about the types of shows being watched.  But even good shows can be detrimental when there are too many of them viewed during the day.  And television watching is so passive most of the time.  I wanted my kids to discover the joys of reading a great book, and their television habits were getting in the way.

So what should we do to fix this problem?  The obvious solution was to turn off the satellite access, but I balked a bit at that.  The one thing that I absolutely love about having satellite access at home is that we get BYU television, and so we can watch General Conference from home twice a year.  I can't even begin to explain just what a big deal that is for me.  I remember being a young mother and attending Conference when you could only see it at the church building.  I remember trying desperately to keep young children quiet for eight hours of Conference during the weekend so that the other people in attendance could enjoy the words being spoken.  It was well worth the trouble that we went to, but it wasn't the most fun either.  It was a HUGE blessing when we could now sit at home and watch the same thing without having to worry about disturbing others.  Luckily, however, the internet speeds have sped up to the point where we could stream the session live to our computer without much trouble, so I was willing to take a chance and give up my BYU television access.

   



I was tempted to do this!
But I couldn't go that far.

We contacted DirecTV and suspended our service for six months.  It wasn't an outright cut off.  It was more like a trial period to see how things went.  They shut off the service right before Conference, and that was our first major test of going without the satellite service.  How did it turn out?  Not too bad.  We gathered around the computer in comfortable chairs and got to see and hear everything.  Granted, it wasn't on the giant big screen, but we didn't need the big picture to hear the messages that we wanted to hear.  I only missed the tv a tiny little bit.  We survived.

We haven't completely cut ourselves off from technology.  We still have netflix streaming so that we can watch some previous seasons of shows we enjoy.  There are some good children's options on there for those times when Mommy needs the kids to take a tv break to preserve my sanity.  (Come on!  I know other people out there do that, don't they?)  But adding the extra steps it takes to get the netflix streaming going is just enough to keep the kids from being glued to the tv all the time.  Suddenly our house was quieter.  I even felt calmer because I didn't have to listen to political blowhards contantly feeding the latest talking points to people pretending to be journalists on the screen.  It was refreshing.

And an amazing thing has started to take place. . . .

The kids are playing outside a lot more!

They are getting along . . . mostly!



All of them are reading
and reading and reading!

It's a miracle!  Hurray!

Now it has been more than a month.  How are we faring?  Wonderfully.  I barely miss it at all.  I wonder how we will feel during the Olympics this summer?  Or other big sporting events like the All-Star game or World Series?  I'm not sure.  But I think that whatever inconvenience we might face, it will be far outweighed by the blessings we have received by having the access turned off.  I'm finding that I like the way that our family is whenever we aren't glued to the set.  I like the way I feel when I'm not irritated by political coverage.  It's a win/win for all of us.  We'll see how things turn out, but for now I'd say that our grand experiment has been a great success.