Pulling the Plug - A Year Without Television

On Sunday evening, after the Super Bowl is over, I will be dismantling and removing from our house all our televisions and Xboxes. Monday morning I will be returning the cable company’s digital card and our family will be spending the next year, at least, without television.

This modernistic drastic change has come about because our 13-year old son's grades continue to slide and more measured efforts to get him to make his homework a priority have failed. The lure of playing Minecraft, Halo, MW3 or Skyrim on the X-Box or watching an episode of Dr Who or some other show off Netflex was so much he would routinely deny he had homework to do.

It's not just him who has problems managing television exposure it's the whole family. Most meals are in front of the tube and our longest discussion what what show and episode we would watch on Netflex. Often it would be a favorite episode of Psych which we had already all watched six or more times together. After dinner broke up my wife would head to our bedroom to watch cooking contest shows on the Food Channel while browsing on her laptop and listening to podcasts on her iPod. I, after asking my son if he had homework, would play on the Xbox with our without him. I can play MW3, Black Ops and Halo for hours, sometimes, many times, past midnight. I love it. I'm addicted to it too.
Part of this behavior on my part, I understand, is my attempt to distract me from worrying about problems at work and at home. I do it because when playing the game nothing else matters. It's scary.

Planning a Killing

I have been threatening to kill off the tube for a couple of years now. Slowly with each report card and each attempt at curbing our son's exposure to something everyone else was watching was ending in backsliding and giving in I would keep bring it up. Mostly it was meet with disbelief I would ever insist on it and a since of surety that if I ever did it would not be supported by the other parental power.  But the idea was germinating in both my wife and daughter's minds. On our 20th anniversary in September my wife gave me a card redeemable for “winning one argument.” I had been planning to use it to kill off the tube since then but was failing in nerve to pull the trigger. The truth is I didn't want to live without it and am unsure of how everyone would respond and deal with the loss. In the end I didn't have to use it, my wife agreed to the measure.

Not Unprecedented 

Back when I was in Junior High, in the mid-1970s, my dad would leave on business trips that would take upwards to three or even four weeks. On one such occasion, in the middle of winter, just after he had left on a three week trip our television imploded. When the glass and dust was cleaned up my brother and sisters were disturbed to understand my mother was unwilling to buy another until our father returned from his trip. I can remember we thought it was a calamity. Back in those days we got one station from Twin Falls, Idaho 45 miles away and could just get in another two stations in Pocatello, one Public Broadcast, from 90 miles away via relay station. Three stations and we thought we were going to expire. We would have nothing to do and nothing to talk about with our friends at school. Our evenings would be spent blinking at each other.

The first few days we did experience severe withdraw symptoms. But when we complained that we were bored to my mom, who never lived in a house with a television until she married my dad, she suggested we read a book or play a board game.  Grudgingly we made our way to the book shelfs and the town library.

The effect was dramatic. Soon we were playing nightly board games and reading books and magazines, drawing and using our hands to make stuff.  I discovered J.R.R. Tolkien, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and I was off on exploring the world and ideas through books.

By the time my father returned from his business trip we all decided we would continue to live without television. My grades in school improved dramatically, enough so I could attend collage.  I did not get a television until my mother gave me a set with a built in VHR player so I could watch rented movies. It was years later after my wife and I got married we got cable. Once our son came we would park him between us Saturday morning and play Toy Story over and over while we slept in. We trained our son to watch television. Our daughter was different. She would rather play by herself and be ruled only by her own internal dialog.

So Starts Our Great Adventure

Our thinking here is that one of use (probably all of us really) are struggling and we need to remove distractions and time sucks. My wife and I do not want to fail in preparing our children for their future. It's only television after all. We are not giving up shelter, hot water, soda pop or cars. We are not going to live like it's 1813 or weave our own clothing.

It's only television. How hard can it be.

We will still have one desktop computer, two laptops, an iPad, three iPods, and two iPhones so we’ll still be digital just not big screen.

The televisions remain in the house until Sunday afternoon but can not be viewed – which is quite a temptation. We'll see how three days of living with them in the house goes.