What! No TV!

It was a simple question, but it remains with me to this day.
The Alaskan visitor to our study group had mentioned long winter nights without television. An incredulous suburbanite stared open mouthed at her, “No TV? What do you do without TV?”
“Have you ever heard of reading books?” only the Alaskan’s look of condescension superseded her scoffing response.
It still amuses me.
I had heard of reading books – we didn’t have a television. No TV to distract our energetic boys for even an hour or two while I cooked supper. We had heard of reading books – I felt like a reading machine around my pre-schoolers.
I was reminded of that interchange when I read a recent e-mail from Arkansas Children’s Hospital alerting the public to a recent study that links early television viewing with later attention problems. The research from the American Academy of Pediatrics studied the early television exposure and subsequent attention problems in children. The AAP found that “television viewing at 1 and 3 years of age was associated with attention problems at age 7.”
“This does not mean that television viewing may lead to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), but it certainly raises concerns,” wrote Dr. Lowe.
Shades of the horror of the suburbanite without television, Lowe recognized that “parents find it difficult to come up with other activities to replace television, particularly when it has been used to pacify children or to keep children occupied when parents need to do chores or activities.”
“We tend to forget that children, particularly those younger than 2, can be perfectly happy and content playing with a few basic toys in their crib or play area,” Lowe said.
Actually children do quite well without television. It is the adults who are addicted to using the mind-numbing baby sitter at home and in day care centers. Plunk those kids in front of the tube and no one has to be creative and come up with story time, a craft, or just work through little kids squabbling over who gets which toy.
Without television our children kept busy doing all those activities that other people talk about doing – gardening, remodeling, building, playing games, reading books with the children. A couple times we dumped all the kids Lego blocks on the table, divided them up evenly so that each person had their own pile of blocks to use or swap and we each used our imagination to design something with the pieces in front of us. Who had time for TV? We were too busy.
Because I did not have a television to distract toddlers while I did my chores, I included them as I worked. One of my favorite pictures is of a 4-year-old grinning at me as he washes the window, copying my morning’s activity. Another picture shows a pre-schooler with a hoe in our freshly weeded garden wiping his brow. He did not really do much more than copy our chopping motions in a safe aisle of dirt, but he was doing, not sitting and watching and he felt capable of doing a big person’s activity.
What do you do with children without TV? Plenty, just turn it off and turn on your brain – you might be surprised how well your children do in school when they get there.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)