What 5 kids and a dead DVR taught me about TV
Who’s the person I might have become, if I hadn’t spent so much time watching TV?
Would you believe that the major TV networks have already promoted their new shows for next fall? The idea of major network shows seems kind of old fashioned to me in the age of Netflix, iTunes and Google Play. The show getting the most buzz right now — The Handmaid’s Tale — is on something called Hulu. Actually, all that buzz might suggest that TV has escaped the bonds of schedules and ad revenues and become even more powerful. TV is dead! Long live TV!
Maybe it happened bit by bit, or maybe in a flash, but TV’s been dead at our house for a while. Over the years, as we had more children, my husband and I watched less and less TV. We used to watch TV dramas and comedies every night, but the older kids started staying up later and we needed the same amount of sleep. Sometime after our fourth child was born, our DVR sat at 98 per cent full for months … no, years, actually. An entire season of The Good Wife languished there. Multiple episodes of … God, I can’t even remember the title — it was the American version of Sherlock Holmes starring the British guy. And then one day I turned it on and POOF — nothing. Zero per cent full. At first I panicked, and then I was annoyed (yet another tech device on the fritz), but then came an unexpected wave of relief. I accepted that I would never watch any of those shows and this felt strangely wonderful.
As a younger person, I used to roll my eyes (on the inside) at people who said they didn’t watch TV. What, did they think it was some kind of intellectual achievement? Did they think they were BETTER than the rest of us? Massive swaths of my life were spent in front of The Box; as a child, I could tell you which episode it was of M*A*S*H or Little House on the Prairie reruns just by the first few seconds of the opening scene. And TV didn’t keep me from being an intelligent critical thinker! It didn’t hurt me at all! Except that it did. Now, in the midst of raising children without any screen time — no iPads, no phones, no whatever — I wonder what kind of kid I would have been if I hadn’t had TV. After all, the research about the damage done by screen time is piling up: the more media exposure girls get, for example, the lower their self-esteem. The more time we spend in front of a screen, the more likely we are to be depressed and lonely. Though humans are social animals, we tend to shy away from human contact because it’s a risky business: there might be an awkward pause; someone might say the wrong thing; it might get boring; there might be something caught in someone’s teeth …. Screen time is so much easier, and safer; it thrives on, and feeds, our human insecurities.
During classroom discussions of research on the effects of screen time, a few students are certain to protest that they love their phones and Facebook, and they’re not depressed or lonely. They spend 30 hours a week playing violent video games, and they don’t even own a gun! I ask them to think about the effects of screen time that research can’t measure: the opportunities lost. In other words: what are the things I might have done, who’s the person I might have become, if I hadn’t spent so much time watching TV?
These questions occur to me more and more as I watch my kids growing up. They’re game to try everything, even with kids they’ve never met before. I wasn’t game to try much of anything. If I couldn’t do something well the first time, that was it — I was out. I feared failure and I feared embarrassment. I feared being the only one in the room no one would talk to. I feared mostly everything, maybe because I was never forced to get over this fear, or develop better social connections, or develop hobbies, or join in team sports, or get out of the house — after all, I had TV.
It took five children and a broken DVR to do it, but I’m finally free of TV. I’m sure there are some shows that are worth watching — some commendable, even inspiring, explorations of the human experience — but I’ve found that screen time is a seductive and slippery slope, particularly in its latest incarnations which are engineered to be addictive. And as I watch my kids filling their days with things I never did, my gut tells me that the greatest worth of all is found when a child isn’t distracted from the task of being completely engaged in exploring their own potential.
Latham Hunter is a writer and professor of cultural studies and communications; her work has been published in journals, anthologies, magazines and print new for over 20 years. She blogs at The Kids’ Book Curator.