I've been dreading this post. I even toyed with the idea of not even sharing this - ever. Just pretending I didn't agree to the challenge last week and proceeding with regularly scheduled programming.
I went back and looked at the directions given at Unplug Your Kids for this challenge. I noted that Phase Two of the Turnoff Week was:
Do your best to meet your goals from April 20-26. If you aren’t successful, it’s OK. What is important is to try, and to learn something from the experience.
Okay, so that gives me a little more freedom to be honest here. Because Turnoff Week for us was mostly a gigantic FAIL. Not a complete fail, more accurately a 60-65% fail. Monday, Tuesday, and even Wednesday went great. Monday and Tuesday we were my parents' house, and as I suspected, neither girl was interested in TV. Of course, they had grandparents at the ready who were all-too-happy to read to them, color with them, and go sit outside for them for hours at a time. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were not great. As in, I just gave up even trying to count the hours the TV had been on. Yesterday was better, but we had church in the morning and evening to keep us pretty busy, too.
I've thought a lot about why this was so hard for us last week, and these are my conclusions:
1) bad timing - like I wrote last week, the past few weeks have just been enormously busy for our family, and we were out of town for days at a time. By the time we finally landed mid-week, the house was a wreck, no one had clean clothes, and I simply didn't have the time or energy to devote to creating distractions to keep Dacey's mind off of the turned-off TV. (As usual, AJ didn't care one way or the other if the TV was on or off.)
2) poor planning and lack of discipline - this all ties in to the bad timing, too. I had it in my mind that Turnoff Week started today, so I hadn't done anything concrete to prepare for a week of reduced TV time. And so when Dacey was insistent on watching "Dacey shows," I caved pretty easily. Additionally, towards the end of the week, I had a bout with monster headaches which happens to me every now and again. This did not help or encourage me in my resolve to limit our TV time.
3) I realized throughout the week, I don't know how to do this.
(This is the part that is hard for me to share. In my quest for ever-more authenticity, I know I need to write even that which makes me feel squirmy to deal with.)
There are just some parts of effective parenting that I don't know how to do. I don't know how to go about doing the tasks I have to do to keep our home running without relying on the TV as a distraction for my children.
When I was preparing to be a classroom teacher, I got to spend a whole semester under the guidance of a veteran. By the end of the first week of student teaching, my veteran had turned over five of her classes to me to teach on my own, but she was ever present in guiding and directing me. We planned and talked through lessons together, she showed me the most efficient and effective ways to grade papers, she gave me feedback on classroom management and stepped in when it became necessary. Every bit of that last semester of preparation I had before I was released into the wild was about collaboration. She offered and I readily accepted her tried-and-true wisdom on how to be an effective teacher. I learned so much more than I could have ever learned in textbooks on pedagogy. I left student teaching with a model in mind of how to teach language arts to high schoolers.
I don't feel like I have a good model of what day-to-day effective home management (minus TV) looks like. I most certainly can devote hours of my day to art projects and nature walks and trips to the library and imaginative play. Those are the most favorite parts of my job. But I cannot do that all day, every day. I must also make time for cleaning house, the constant clutter pick-up, paying bills, making and returning phone calls, meal planning, cooking dinner, washing dishes, keeping up with laundry and ironing, and the other myriad of responsibilities . . . all of which is completely common to the average homemaker.
The problem for me lies in that when the TV is off, I have children at my feet, getting out what I put away, undoing what I have done, begging me to play, asking to get paints out or dreaming up any other number of things to do while I work, all of which makes getting my work done take about ten times longer than it should.
Truth be told, I really do not love the housekeeping part of homemaking. I just want it to be done. To do it quickly as possible, I turn the TV on to keep them distracted. My daughters are four and twenty months, so having them go read quietly or make up games to play doesn't last very long. I can remember when I was growing up my parents had limits on TV, but I can't remember what we did prior to being school-age. I also grew up in a time where parents could turn their kids outside to play for hours on end with little fear of anything horrible happening. Our yard is not fenced in, and even if it were, I don't think I could turn them outside without me being there to keep an eye on them. Horrible, horrible things happen even in small town Oklahoma.
Wow, this is getting a lot more whiny and rambly than I thought it would be.
Here's what I learned:
1) I don't think the TV has been excruciatingly negative for my children. Dacey is completely on-track in social, cognitive, and physical development. A friend emailed after my challenge post last week and shared some ways TV has sparked learning and conversation for her family, and I have to agree with what she said. In some ways, TV has played a positive role in our family. This could change, certainly, but I don't know that we will ever be a completely TV-free family, and I am okay with that.
2) I do want to work towards less TV on a regular basis. I want to learn how to go about my tasks as a homemaker without resorting to TV for babysitting. I want to learn here, but I don't know where to start.
3) Even though I didn't meet the goals for my Turnoff Week challenge, I am glad I participated. It caused me to do some heavy critical thinking and self-analysis about myself and our family that I probably would not have engaged in if it weren't for Turnoff Week. Thank you to Unplug Your Kids for hosting!
I'm open to any feedback on this. I know most all of the Turnoff Week participants live mostly TV-free lives, and I'll happily accept any insights you can share. For those who also struggle with the TV time, just know you have a fellow struggler in me.
