We did a very un-American thing in our home recently; we put away our television antenna. We had been thinking about it for some time, but we finally took the plunge. And it's made our home a better place already.
It is difficult for many people to understand why we would want to excommunicate the television from our family. After all, television isn't *that* bad, is it? And if we do not have TV shows streaming into our living room, how will we spend our time, anyway?
The answer to our motivation is simple: our twin daughters will be turning three years old later this month. And they are getting smart enough to begin to understand, and be influenced by, the images they see on the television. Which brings us back to the question of whether TV is really so bad?
Yes, it is. Having grown up our whole lives with television, and having watched at least 20,000 hours of it during that time, it was not easy to recognize this fact. And besides, even most people who agree that there are bad things on television would not consider turning it off. But we have been putting a lot of thought into how we want to raise our children. We have even decided to homeschool them so that we can be sure to fill their days with the lessons we feel are most important for them to learn, rather than those chosen by others.
But what good would all that effort be if every evening we invited a group of celebrities over to our home to teach our children that parents are morons, that our Christian faith is based on lies, and that the most important thing in the world is having a satisfying love life? That is what the television does, and the shows are not even the worst part of it. We could set up the perfect television viewing schedule, with only the most wholesome and educational shows the networks provide, and our children would still be bombarded by the ugliest phantoms of modern media: the commercials.
More so than any show in existence, it is the commercials that seek to tell us all, and especially our children, what is important in life. The problem is that the things these advertisers believe are important are not the things we believe are important. One hour of television watching will teach you that the three keys to happiness are being physically attractive, having far more money than you could ever need, and taking the right combination of prescription drugs. Not the message we want our children to receive.
When we realized this, we came to understand that the television, the guiding light of popular culture, has become not only a nuisance but also the sworn enemy of our family. Our children will see every bad thing under the sun as they grow up in this world; that's just real life. But if we invite these things into our home through the television, we are endorsing them. We can tell our children, "this show is terrible," but if we keep watching it, what we are really telling them is "sure it's bad, but I like it that way."
So good-bye, antenna. The TV can stay, but only for the sake of the DVD player, which will be on a strict diet of quality programs such as Signing Time, Dora the Explorer, and Star Trek. And only a couple times a day, because books are better for us anyway.
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Copyright, Paul Martin, Noss Galen Baby LLC 2006
Paul and Alison Martin are the owners of Noss Galen Baby LLC, a small online business dedicated to offering innovative, hard-to-find products for babies and toddlers at affordable prices.
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