Last year, we got rid of our television. Pretty much, anyway: it lives in the attic of our increasingly cramped two-bedroom maisonette. The TV only comes down for mummy and daddy’s Friday night date nights and for occasional family film time.
Any time gained by putting the television on was almost invariably lost (and then some) by arguing about switching it off
With three kids under five, we did not come to this momentous bit of Ludditery lightly. However, our three kids had never really had that much screen time anyway: YouTube, tablets, and phones are verboten, and we have never opened the entertainment sluice gate by just ‘sticking the telly on’ and subjecting them to what we unapologetically call ‘twaddle’. Our television wasn’t even connected to the aerial. Generally, TV was for carefully chosen movies, Attenborough, and, most crucially, ‘witching hours’.
Parents of small children know that of which I speak – those times when, bless them, it just seems unreasonable to expect the kids to do anything other than flop onto the sofa and zonk out to a few episodes of Octonauts or Bluey. The run up to tea-time, the end of a long day at school or nursery, the morning after a late night – these are the ratty fag-ends of a young family’s day, when tempers fray, energy levels plummet, and emotions run high. In such times, the screens reign. These are also usually times when mummy and daddy really need to ‘do jobs’: get the dinner on, have a quick tidy, put the washing on the line. During these vital windows, television-wielding parents can neutralise their little adversaries into a semi-catatonic state more effectively than James Bond choke holding a cohort of unobservant henchmen as he infiltrates Blofeld’s lair.
Why on earth, then, would a screen-lite family jettison their already minimal television time? Expressing concerns about television use in 2024, when most kids are drooling over tablets and phones, can seem a bit like fretting to Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 about being at the mercy of the telephone – count your blessings. But in short: it caused more problems than it solved. Now, of course, parenting is often the practice of choosing which set of problems you are most willing to put up with, but that was just it: having a television was causing more of exactly the problems we were using it to solve.
Our chief reason for having the telly was a sincere belief that, if we didn’t, we would spend the next hour locking horns with children who couldn’t entertain themselves and insisted on arguing with us. But regular TV use makes both of those things worse.
First, if you constantly resort to the television when you think your children can’t entertain themselves then (and it sounds obvious when you say it out loud to yourself), they will never learn to entertain themselves. ‘The child is the father of the man,’ said Wordsworth, and if a childhood is spent constantly following the path of least resistance when you’re a bit tired or grumpy, what kind of adult are you going to end up with?
Second, any time gained by putting the television on was almost invariably lost (and then some) by arguing about switching it off, whatever warning we gave. This was especially the case with our eldest son, approaching three at the time. Learning self-control will eventually be an essential part of his growth into manhood. But given what a television actually is – a loud and luminous dopamine machine dominating the living room like an oversized household god – is it really fair to, on a daily basis, hook a two-year-old and then cut off his supply?
A chief vice of modern parenting is expecting both too much and too little of our children. We ask too much when we expect very young ones to switch screens off without a fight; yet we ask too little when we think they can’t survive without them. We were stunned by how easily our eldest two accepted things (the baby kept his thoughts to himself). Within days, witching hours had basically vanished. I hate to make them sound like cherubs in a Titian painting, but they really did just take themselves off to play, devising some new game called ‘Not Nice Cats’ (which I gather involved pretending to be cats who were not very nice). They dug out things they hadn’t played with in ages, and their games got noticeably longer and more involved. Our eldest boy still likes to argue the toss as much as the next fiery young lad, but he swiftly adjusted to the novus ordo around the television.
So parents: it might involve a few days of whinging and remonstrance, but it is actually possible in 2024 to live without a television. Your kids will probably be better off for it. And (whisper it) you may actually find that you are too.
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