No Cable/Satellite TV! Am I the only one left???

[MFL]

Bob,

When my wife and I moved to our property, not only did we not hook up the cable/satellite, the first day at the house I took down the huge, ugly antenna that was mounted on the chimney. Before moving to the country, we had pulled the plug on all TV for about two years, and we continued the practice once we bought the farm. It's been seven years, now. We have A TV, we just don't have TV. We use NetFlix to rent movies, but otherwise never stare at the boob tube. I have to say, it's one of the best decisions I've made as an adult.

Not having children, I'm probably talking out my you know what a little, but I think it's probably one of the best things you can do for your daughter. We have between us, 13 nieces and nephews who along with their parents will visit for a week or two throughout the summer. When the kids arrive it's almost like watching a junkie going through withdrawal. We have all the usual diversions of a farm, but it's like pulling teeth to get them to go out and do SOMETHING! Since they don't have the option of T.V, they try and compensate with the computer, video games, Game Boys, ANYTHING to get the boob tube fix. After a few days, they're out with the horses, building forts, riding bikes, BEING KIDS!! It's an amazing process to watch.

Stay the course. Your daughter will thank you for it when she's old enough to appreciate the well rounded life you afforded her!

 

[Bob_Skurka]

Charlie, we don't do this as a form of punishment, we simply encourage other activities. TV is limited during some times of the year by activities, and other times of the year by us.

She is 9, she goes to bed at 9pm. During the school year she is often busy with after school activities such as homework, saturday classes for gifted children at the state college extention campus, competitive swimming(2 to 3 nights per week), violin lesson(1 night), horse lesson(1 night), Girl Scouts(1 day e.o.week), etc. Then we eat dinner together (almost every night), then she showers. By the time she is done with that, she usually has less than 1 hour before bedtime. Last night we laid in bed and took turn reading books. Granted they were short books, but we alternated reading and got through 3 books together. I think she probably saw about 15 minutes of TV, and she was the one who wanted to read the books.

As for her friends, all of them live in town. And no we don't pick them for her. But they love to invite themselves over to our house and, to be honest, we love to have them over because we can keep an eye on them. We host sleep overs on a regular basis, her playhouse (see the photos in the photo section) is a regular hangout for tea parties, and even the entire Girl Scout troop has scheduled camp outs in our valley. Because we are outside of town we essentially landscaped several areas like a park, with jungle gym, playhouse, etc. It is done well enough that people looking at buying the house next door to our property asked if everyone in the neighborhood had access to the "park" in the valley. So while we don't really pick her friends, we do encourage them to spend their time at our home.

I guess I wonder if the issue of cable/satellite TV is only a big deal at school? It certainly doesn't seem to be any issue at all when they come over to our house. I guess maybe it is more a curiosity for the other kids that we don't have something that EVERYONE has. And it is probably a curiosity for my daughter because the other kids talk about stuff that she doesn't ever see?

 

[MFL]

Garry,

Well said!! My wife works in social services and sees the results of parents parking their kids in front of the TV ( I'm trying to be sensitive and not call it the idiot box) all day. It makes a HUGE difference in a kids life when parents spend time with them, and they all spend time together participating in the real world instead of staring at the mindless, endless commercial.

If anybody thinks allowing a kid unlimited access to the unlimited drivel on TV is a good idea, they should also buy their kids a carton of cigarettes and a six pack to go with their TV watching. Get it all out of the way at once.!!

Can you tell this is a passionate subject for me?? /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif

 

[jayhawkRoy]

My kids grew up with only the local TV channels -- no cable. They turned out just fine. Our rule was no TV until after chores and homework were both done. Both kids also enjoyed playing outside, or doing after school activities, so TV exposure was limited that way. Cable was available, but we didn't pay for it. The old fashioned antenna did just fine.

Where we live now, we are still waiting for cable hook ups. The cable company tore up my yard, two years ago, put in cable to service the neighborhood, found out the service cable doesn't work, and have yet to provide cable service to our small subdivision. Neighbors a couple of miles down the road have service, but we don't. Half of the families in our subdivision now have small dishes. We would be interested in cable for the high speed internet connection, because rural phone dial up is slow and expensive. The side benefit to me would be more sports channels.

You might reconsider the one hour of TV per night for your daughter, so long as she is doing fine in school. Even for old, grumpy me, one hour of TV seems to be too conservative. One of my wife's siblings' family had a no TV rule, and their kids would be totally mesmerized by any TV show, when they were at houses that had TV. My conclusion was that some TV exposure is OK (content selective, of course), and no TV exposure had its own hazards built in. Botom line, from my perspective, is some TV is OK, kid's own chosen activities and family chores inherently limited the amount of TV exposure, and absolutely no TV exposure increases the desire to watch TV, simply because it is off limits.

 

[MFL]

jayhawkroy,

Not trying to be a smart*ss, but I am curious to know what you would consider the hazards of not having TV at all? As you can probably tell from my previous posts, I'm not a big fan of TV. I had the chance to travel when I was younger, and I was always surprised how well kids did in parts of the world where TV isn't anywhere near as prevalent as it is here. If kids have ample access to books, a supervised internet, liberaries, good schools, and an involved family, I honestly don't know what "hazards" a child would face by not having TV.

 

[MikePA]

We've had cable and satellite but never had to restrict the daughters (now 20 and 17). My wife and I are both readers and we read to the kids when they were little and they picked up the habit. More often than not, both of them have always preferred to read a book in their room versus sit and watch TV. When they were little, we watched some kids shows with them (Sesame Street). As they got older, I blocked MTV (a feature of satellite we had and a the DVRs we have) as well as any movie rated R or above. I also password protected ordering movies (a nice feature of satellite TV). Occasionally, they'd ask to see a certain R movie, we'd allow on a case by case basis.

While there are many interesting as well as educational shows on cable (History Channel has a lot of great shows), there's also a lot of brain candy (VH1, E!) that aren't worth it. While it seems to be popular to slam TV in general, like most things in life, moderation is the key.

 

[lynxpilot]

Bob,

I think you're doing the right thing. I can't imagine what TV could possibly offer to improve your (or daughter's) life.

I just moved from a career of urban living to a small farm, where cable, dsl, etc. are not available and I refuse to waste my money on hundreds of mindless channels with satellite. I let there be no doubt with the family about that when we moved. The only thing I'll budge on is a roof mounted antenna because we don't get ANY channels here well.

Not seeing cable news has been a huge relief on the stress factor for ME and I actually feel better and am healthier than I was when I was worrying about the other side of the world.

There's plenty to do around the farm. TV isn't even a factor any more.

Good for you.

Dave

 

[RobertN]

We have no cable, and are too cheap to get Sattelite. When we had cable at the old house, we tended to watch a lot of Discovery and A&E, but even that wore of after a bit. For all the channels we had, there just was not that much that was good or stimulating.

We have the obnoxious antanea, and get the local channels. There are a few shows we like and watch. We do watch out for what our 10 year old watches. We get the local news, and Moday Night Football. Past that and a few other shows, there just is not that much there that we find worth spending our valuable time on.

Sometimes in discussion, people are suprised that we don't have cable/sattelite. Of more suprise to a lot of folks, we only have one TV /forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif

However, our son is pretty creative. And already max's out the charts for reading and comprehension(surpasses 12th grade levels).

Too boot too, the video game we have is the 12 year old Sega, and we only have one game. We do have a few computer games though...

IMHO, I think you are doing a great thing. There is a great big world out there away from the TV. People did well without it for eon's.

 

[Bob_Skurka]

<font color="green"> However, our son is pretty creative. And already max's out the charts for reading and comprehension(surpasses 12th grade levels). </font>

My daughter (who is not "gifted" but who is pretty smart), now in 4th grade, won the science fair last year, in kindergarten was nominated into a college extention program on the weekends, plays both the piano (badly) and the violin (pretty well), won a county wide art contest, can play for hours by herself and create all sorts of 'worlds' for her dolls, and while she does enjoy TV and while she can become mesmorized by it on the weekends, spent an entire weekend watching less than 30 minutes of TV, but did watch a video with her friend on Saturday night when the friend slept over.

We play board games with her & her friends and this weekend we played "Pictionary Junior" and the friend who was staying with us had to constantly be told what the clues mean (and in every case it was my daughter who did the explaining). We've seen my daughter play Monopoly and LIFE with her 14 year old babysitter and my daughter ends up as the "banker" because the babysitter is so bad at math that our 9 year old can count money better than the babysitter. We credit this stuff to creating an enviornment where TV is not the major family activity.

I guess I don't miss not having 100 channels of garbage (I grew up without it) and we are not trying to deprive her, we just feel that she should have OTHER interests. So far it has worked out pretty well, but I do admit to questioning our judgement every now and again as we have become the 'nutcases' who don't have cable so there must be something 'wrong' with us.

 

[jayhawkRoy]

The hazard I was referring to was that the kids were totally mesmerized by any TV program and stayed totally glued to the TV, much more so than my kids, who were exposed to moderate levels of TV watching. Obviously my brother in law's family did not see the hazards or risk the same way I did. I believe TV exposure should be moderated. There are also some good educational programs out there, like age-appropriate PBS programs, that assist kids in the developmental process.

As I indicated in my first post, we may have had fewer problems because the kids were busy doing other stuff, outside, inside, at friends' houses, school activities, scouts, etc. That limits the amount of TV exposure, anyway. Additionaly, both were voracious readers, further limiting TV exposure, so may be we were just lucky. I just know we did not raise little couch potatoes.

Just our collective family's experience from my perspective -- no cure-alls, no silver bullets.