[Vision2020] Go TV Free

[Bill London]

 Tara Roberts wrote an excellent article about local families who are raising their kids without commercial television.  (see the text below)

I applaud those parents and believe they have made the appropriate choice for their kids and themselves.  We raised our daughter (she's now 29) without TV, and we still do not watch TV (though we do watch DVD's).  No TV for us meant more time together, more games of Scrabble, more family trips, but that has really helped mold our daughter into a great woman and excellent mother and generally fun and caring person.

So, to anyone wondering how they can take control of their family again, and break through their children's bonds to a surley and crass consumerist culture, my advice is: end your relationship with television.

BL






Tuning Out: Local families say giving up TV has gotten them outside, into books

By Tara Roberts, Daily News staff writer

Saturday, August 11, 2007 - Page Updated at 12:00:00 AM

Karl Erhard-Hudson knows exactly how being television-free has affected his family.

"It's made it so I'm not in front of the TV whenever I get the chance," the 9-year-old Moscow resident said. "Then I have to go and play outside if I'm bored."

Karl's mom, KarlaRose Erhard-Hudson, smiled at him.

"That's a good thing, right?" she asked.

The Erhard-Hudson family - Karl, KarlaRose, dad Joseph and daughter Jamie, 2 - is among several on the Palouse who have given up cable and satellite television in favor of a more screen-free lifestyle.

KarlaRose said it was not a big decision for her family to turn off the tube. In fact, they've never had television, except for watching movies and buying cable for a month every two years to watch the Olympics.

"I don't understand how anybody has time to watch TV," she said. "I guess it's easy for us because it wasn't a matter of weaning ourselves off it."

KarlaRose is an administrative assistant at the University of Idaho physics department and Joseph is the IT manager for the Moscow Food Co-op. When the family isn't busy with work or school, they like to go to their cabin in Montana with friends, swim at the aquatic center or play games.

The family reads together every day - right now, Karl and Joseph are going through the "Lord of the Rings" series. Karl loves playing with Legos and playing outside in the family's yard.

They do have a TV, but it's only for watching DVDs and videos. KarlaRose said nothing would sway them to hook up to cable.

"This way we can choose very explicitly what we pay attention to or not," Joseph said.



Outside the box

Barbara Brock, a recreation management professor at Eastern Washington University, recently published "Living Outside the Box: TV-free Families Share Their Secrets." She interviewed 500 families in 43 states about their experiences.

Brock and her husband, Vern, stopped watching TV when their children, Sydney and Adam, were toddlers. 

As they talked to other families, "we realized being TV-free was very strange," Brock said.

Now that her children are teenagers, they have full, busy lives that have never included TV.

"They really have lots of hobbies, lots of interests," Brock said. "If we had a TV we don't know what we'd give up to watch it."

Brock was inspired to begin her research after hearing the average American spends four hours a day watching TV. She wondered what other TV-free families did with their extra four hours, and placed an advertisement in three magazines in search of families to survey.

She was overwhelmed by the response. Though she expected "TV-free families might be pretty strange," she was surprised to find people of all ages and incomes who were normal and happy.

Brock discovered that 70 percent of parents in TV-free households felt their children got along better, 80 percent of adults felt their marriages were stronger after giving up TV, and 90 percent of the families surveyed said they never regretted their decision.



Meet the families

The Erhard-Hudson family isn't the only one to give up TV.

Bill Brock of Pullman (no relation to Barbara) hasn't watched TV since he was little. Now that he and his wife, Dr. Kim Guida, have children of their own, the TV is still restricted to DVD and videos only.

Even then, Bill Brock would prefer his daughters, Sage, 3, and Reed, 1, don't get stuck to a screen at all. He wants them to be outside, getting dirt under their fingernails.

"I would much rather my kids be outside playing in the leaves or canoeing with me, chasing muskrats," he said. "I think there's a real danger of losing your connection to the physical world by sitting inside, staring at an incandescent screen."

Watching TV encourages complacency and deadens the acquisition of language, Bill Brock said. Sage loves to talk to people and be read to, and her dad wants her to hone those skills.

"To watch the ravening flame of literacy take light, it's exciting for a parent," he said. "I want to see my daughter be expressive and glib and able to hold her own, and she is."

Moscow residents Alice Swan and Nick Wallin also pick books over screens in their family. Swan, house manager at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Center, and Wallin, conductor of the Washington State University orchestra and the Washington-Idaho Symphony, got rid of their TV about five years ago.

They're glad to have their sons, Rex, 2, and Enzo, 2 months, grow up without television.

"I hope that they'll have an appetite for reading, and an appetite for being able to content themselves," Swan said.

Wallin said he wants the boys to be creative people.

"You can entertain yourself. You can find something to do on your own," he said.

Swan and Wallin had not watched much TV in their seven years of marriage, but both are glad the temptation is completely gone.

"The TV is like a black hole," Wallin said. "It sucks you in."

The two agreed nothing could convince them to get a TV again.

Kurt Queller and Ellen Kittell and their children, Jonathan Kittell-Queller, 14, and Emily Kittell-Queller, 18, unhooked the cable about three years ago.

Queller said the move was due in part to the expense of cable.

"We just realized we didn't watch enough TV," he said.

The family kept their TV set in a room separate from the main living space and limited the amount of time they watched. Though they still watch movies, they don't do it often.

"I'm really grateful about not watching TV," Queller said. "The temptation is not there to just sit on the couch, veg out and channel surf."


 Staying in tune

Turning off the TV doesn't mean hiding from the world at large.

With radio, print journalism and the Internet, it's possible to keep up with news and pop culture, the families said. With DVDs, it's easy to pick and choose which shows to watch, and how much time to spend watching them.

Queller said he and Kittell are hooked on "Grey's Anatomy," and watch it on DVD.

The Erhard-Hudson parents like "Futurama" and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," but usually end up watching children's shows for Jamie and anime for Karl.

Wallin loves sports and goes out with his friends to watch games. Without a TV at home, he doesn't spend weekends glued to football games anymore, and that makes Swan happy.

Barbara Brock said the main problem with TV isn't so much the programming, but the way it makes families give up time together to watch.

"Everybody's separate anymore," she said. "There's not just one TV and it's sapping everybody's time."

Watching a few movies or TV shows a week isn't so bad, Barbara Brock said. She worries more about the time children spend with "multitasking media" - things like TV, computer games and video games - and how it affects their ability to interact with others.

She wonders if future children will be able to carry on conversations and entertain themselves.

"I just think it's really important that we work on getting ... happiness and fulfillment out of our time," she said.

The families said the temptation to watch TV is sometimes there when they're visiting friends and family with TVs.

"It's really, really annoying if it's in a living space," Jonathan said. If one person's watching, "you sort of get attracted to it; you just start watching it."

Bill Brock said he knows his daughters will be exposed to TV as they grow up, but he's not too concerned.

"My daughter is gonna see TV," he said. "But in my house, other things are a priority."


Time to give it up?

The families all said they'd encourage others to turn off the television permanently.

"More people would be better served by following this example," Bill Brock said.

Wallin and Swan said they read about an "experiment" to sit in front of a turned-off TV for 30 minutes to realize how much time watching TV takes up.

"If anybody's thinking about giving up TV, they should try that," Swan said.

Barbara Brock said most of the families in her book said quitting cold-turkey was the best way to go.

"If a parent can handle 20 minutes of whining, their child will find something else to do," she said.


Tara Roberts can be reached at (208) 882-5561, ext. 234, or by e-mail at troberts at dnews.com.
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