It’s Television Turnoff Week – Are You Unplugged?
April 24, 2008 by Jennifer
If you’re unplugged to save energy; cool. If you’re unplugged and celebrating TV turnoff week, well that’s fine too. I’m not unplugged though for the week, and here’s why.
It’s not a realistic campaign. While I agree with the reasoning, I don’t much agree with how they’re trying to pull this whole, get the family together or get moving or what have you.
First off they lie, or at least exclude decision making processes:
From the TV Turnoff Network: “All TV is passive, sedentary and non-experiential. Most viewers tend to watch show after show–not individual programs. Instead of watching a documentary about birds, go out (with binoculars if you have them) and see how many real birds you can identify in your neighborhood. The purpose of National TV-Turnoff Week is to leave behind judgments about the quality of television and focus instead on creating, discovering, building, participating and doing.”
ALL TV is passive. Really? All of it. I think that’s a stretch. We learned things on home shows that we used to build our house (not passive). Cedar wants to join a jump rope team when he’s old enough and is already doing hip hop dance – every single day (not passive), and why? Because he watched Jump In on TV. If you’re going to call for a ban, at least be honest and consider that some people use the TV to their advantage in useful ways.
I hate the implication that humans can’t make good decisions when exposed to something that’s potentially harmful.
Is TV turnoff week realistic?:
There are other broad claims they make as well. However, one of my biggest issues with TV turnoff week goes back to the whole, it’s not realistic situation. Asking people to turn of the TV for a whole week is not a normal way to learn how to make change. In most cases folks won’t keep that TV off. They might for a while. In fact, the TV site claims that 90% of the folks who participate in turnoff week don’t return to their old TV laden habits. That said, how many are participating? That 90% is a pretty small number if the TV turnoff forums are any indication.
They’re asking for people to make huge leaps all at once instead of incorporating less TV on a normal sort of schedule. In my experience, large leaps don’t tend to hold up. In a completely bizarre switch, TV turnoff week goes from asking folks to make this broad jump, to asking people to make too minor of changes. Like the Family Dinner Night:
“Have you picked your night? Each one of us is picking a night, that cannot change. Pick yours and after dinner, pull out a board game, a deck of cards or something else to do and make a night of it.”
A dinner. One dinner? I’m sorry, but if you’re only eating one dinner, one meal a week together, there’s a much bigger issue at hand then television. Something besides TV is gonna have to give. You should be having far more meals together each week than one.
Learning by negatives:
Learning by negatives is also a big pet peeve of mine. I don’t agree with negatives to make a positive. If a child considers TV a positive in their world, then taking it away to teach them a lesson in fitness, family time, better grades, what have you, is a negative way to do so. A better and actually more realistic way to pull off this lesson is to simply incorporate outdoor time, family dinners, exercise, and togetherness into your life, before, or without taking anything away.
Is TV an easy thing to blame?
Trust me, your kids would rather be with you, doing fun things then watching TV – I’d bet on it. Your kids would rather eat with you than watch a movie. If this is not true in your house, if your kids don’t want to be with you, then however harsh it sounds, it’s your fault. As a parent you make the big choices. You make the choices from day one that define how your kids feel about family time, TV time, and most other issues. If your kids are reluctant to hang out, it tells me that so are you, and you need more than TV turnoff week. You need major changes in your household.
If TV turnoff week got you thinking about this fine, that’s a good thing that TV turnoff week has accomplished, but it’s not TV that’s the issue. It’s our family actions that are to blame. We talk about spending time with our kids a lot here. One because that’s how it should be. And two, the only way our children pick up our green actions is by being with us, by doing.
30 ideas for family activities:
- Make Your Own Natural, Colorful Dyes – Great Kid Nature Project
- Play dress up – let the littles totally raid your make-up and clothes
- Make Your Own Solar Light!
- Color
- Green audit your trash as a family
- Play board games
- Nature Themed Autumn Craft
- Build A Plant Maze!
- Go fishing
- Make some paper
- Read together
- Take a sign language class
- Cook a meal
- See what other other families are doing
- Homemade Organic Paint Soap for Kids
- Play with clay
- Study water – and do some experiments
- Bake cookies or cupcakes
- Five Fun Ways to Reconnect with Nature
- Go bike riding.
- Go On A Treasure Hunt
- Join Journey North
- Build a playing card castle
- Start a garden
- Search for rocks
- Get outside
- Get a pet
- Volunteer to build a house
- Go swimming
- Volunteer to keep the planet clean
There are at least a hundred more ideas on this blog alone related to activities and actions you can take as a family. Not to mention countless others beyond this one little blog. Honestly, you don’t even have to do anything dramatic – just hanging out around the house, doing everyday tasks together works. Don’t just celebrate TV turnoff week to see if you’re up to some random challenge. Make the challenge about your whole world. This is your life, your children’s lives, time you can’t get back. All in all, my biggest issue, I suppose, is that we can do so much better then TV turnoff week.
What do you think?
[photos via stock.xchng]
I think that for most people they have their television on for sound while they are doing other things around the house. That’s what I do anyway when I’m home alone because who wants to be in silence the entire day, right?
I also agree that if a family is only have one meal together a night then there is something wrong besides the television.
I think this would be a great idea if they had said – set a few days aside to turn off your television and spend time with your family, they should be doing that anyway, but to make a strict ” no television for a week ” policy is a little much.
@Liz Maybe some people do like the background noise – my son does like background noise while he’s building Legos for example. I actually try to talk him out of that, because it’s an energy drain, but that’s what I tell him, so he gets it. I listen to my record player, not the TV.
Your idea about a few days a week is better, more realistic. Families who watch TV will likely always watch TV, the best point would be to incorporate other stuff rather than stop TV altogether – then the idea might stick.
@Liz I also meant to say your blog is interesting. But you don’t have an about page, so I’m not exactly sure what it is you’re doing. Is it a blog for a year? To see if you can do one new thing a day?
I was waiting to see if you were going to write about this! You make some good points–especially when you challenge the idea that all t.v.-viewing is passive. As Liz mentioned in her comment, many people do things while watching television. I try to take on a little project like sorting through junk mail, organizing something-or-other, or doing some other boring task while watching shows that don’t demand my full attention. Of course, I may just be trying to justify my television habit!