Greetings from an almost TV-free weekend

So, I finally did the scary thing. I turned off the TV for the entire weekend.

OK, so the girls watched “Dr. Doolittle” on Saturday night before bed, and one show on Nickelodeon last night. But for most of their (and our) waking hours this swelteringly humid weekend, we played. And ate meals at the table together. And played some more.

For most working outside the home parents (and many stay-at-home parents, I suspect) the TV is a gift from God. It gives us the needed break to make a meal or a phone call, do the laundry or just have 30 minutes of peace. I am also guilty of letting my children watch TV for many, many hours on a weekend, just so I can take a nap on the bed while they watch, or so I can read the newspaper or a book.

Or I often watch with them, and know instantly, not whether they’ve already seen this episode of “Fairly Odd Parents” or “Sponge Bob Square Pants” before (they have), but whether it was long enough ago to warrant another viewing without complaint.

Intellectually, I know and understand that watching too much TV isn’t good for them. It can lead to obesity, lower reading scores, the uncanny ability to recite TV commercials at will for decades, yada yada. Guidelines for such TV abuse can be found on Web sites like this:

http://www.ithaca.edu/looksharp/resources_tv.php

I agree with everything they write, but they don’t live in my home, and I am not, nor will I ever be, a perfect mother. Heck, my mother let me watch “Dark Shadows,” whatever 4:30 movie was on, and the news since I was 4 years old. And I turned out fairly well, I reason with myself.

An online group of mothers I know once held a poll on how many hours a day their children watched television. I was amazed that no one said (admitted?) that they let their children watch TV for more than 1 or 2 hours per day. And many even qualified that by saying that such TV time only included PBS channels or educational videos. Needless to say, I didn’t respond.

I’m not going to outright accuse them of lying, but I have to say that in my heart of hearts – I didn’t believe them. I think the stigma of allowing children to watch a lot of television has made us ashamed of the hours we let them sit in front of the boob tube. I was (am) certainly embarrassed that our TV watching is so out of control.

During the week, I can rationalize it because my elderly father watches them after school and camp, and can’t really run around with them too much. Letting them watch TV makes it easier on him.

But the weekends are another matter. We’ve had perfectly beautiful spring and summer weekend days pass by in a blur while they sit transfixed in front of the TV, demanding food and drink be brought to them like the royalty they believe they are (and yes – to keep the peace, I often do it).

Well, this weekend I decided I’d make more healthy meals for them (another blog entry for another day), and that the TV was staying off.

I pulled the plug from both TVs, told them that the electricity was off (“Then why is the light still on?” my precocious Jessica inquired. “Because it’s just the TV electricity that’s off,” I responded, which was, technically, true.

Amazingly, instead of the bored, whiny, annoying 5-year-olds I expected as a result, we had a really nice weekend. We played games, we horsed around, we bought them new 2-wheeler bicycles, we played in the sprinkler at the local playground, and interacted with them in all kinds of interesting, and enjoyable ways.

What surprised me the most was that they were actually less whiny than usual and even Jessica, who loves TV more than anything except me and her father, only asked for it once or twice. When I firmly said that we were doing something else instead, she quickly accepted it and moved on to riding her scooter or building something or completing another project we had lined up for them. Lily didn't even miss it at all.

So maybe those mothers weren’t lying after all. Maybe they’ve discovered what I finally learned by turning off the TV. That it makes it easier to connect with my children when I don’t have to compete with animated sponges, that it really doesn’t take too much effort to come up with activities that we can all enjoy, and that while they’re completing a project or playing imaginative games with each other and their assorted rubber lizards and stuffed animals, my husband and I still have time to make meals, read a paper or just sit back and enjoy watching them.

Don’t hold me to it, but I think we’re going to stick to “TV-free weekends” from now on.