Join the TV Turnoff Week Challenge
I’m in. I’m taking Mom Unplugged’s TV Turnoff Week Blog Challenge.
I met several media-free families at the CCFC Summit and felt a tad sheepish that I wasn’t one of them. By the end of the Summit I was convinced that no media is good media and charged back to Minnesota with my plan to toss the television out the window.
My husband informed me that that was not going to happen.
So TV Turnoff Week is a great compromise. My challenge will be to turn off the laptop when the girls get home from school and not turn it back on until after supper.
Just typing that now has caused me to hyperventilate.
Want to join in? Head over to Unplug Your Kids – a great blog, by the way — to meet other families who are doing the same.
Additional resources:
Center for Screen-Time Awareness
Kill Your Television
Stone Soup to Support National TV Turnoff
April 17th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
I am so glad you are joining in! Aren’t husbands odd about TV? That seems to be the general consensus among the bloggers who have mentioned their husbands’ lack of enthusiasm for the project. Good luck and try not to hyperventilate too badly! Personally I am still in denial about my efforts to reduce my computer time next week. Thanks for the kind words about Unplug Your Kids by the way, they mean a lot!
April 22nd, 2008 at 4:01 am
Ah, all I can say is thank god I didn’t know about this until it was too late because we would totally fail at this, totally! We don’t watch much TV but I presume DVDs count and a certain toddler is addicted to her daily DVD hour. Consequently, so am I.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:44 am
I’d vote on the TV out the window. It’s quite easy to keep it off when it’s not there.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:49 am
I too participated in TV turn off week, though I don’t have kids so I think it was a little easier. TV becomes habit. Habits are hard to break, but once I started not watching, I found that when I did let myself watch at the end of the week, TV was way less interesting. Perhaps the more we watch, the more conditioned we are to want it and the more used to its lame attempts to entertain (slash brainwash) we get…?
Also, somewhat surprisingly a recent study on happiness by Alan Krueger showed people rated TV as a “neutral” activity (not inducing happiness or sadness). I would have thought that watching a lot of TV would be correlated with depression, or negativity… but perhaps he didn’t look at that variable. He was considering moment to moment happiness.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Casey, I find the less I watch TV, the more it annoys me when it is on. All part of breaking the habit. Thanks for writing.