Turning the Television Off

Personal account from a parent (not me)

We had the typical struggles with our 8 year old son; do your home work, do your chores, practice piano, do some reading. It seemed there were not enough hours in the day. Then we realized that by having the TV on, it was all too easy to watch “just another 15 minutes” which turned into just another half hour and another struggle to brush teeth, get ready for bed and still have time for bedtime reading. So my husband and I made a conscious decision to turn off the TV. There would be no TV during the week on school nights, Friday night was reserved for “family movie night” to watch a movie that we would all enjoy and Saturday morning was our son’s time for cartoons.

Our son moaned about our decision but after only three days he came to me and said that we should have done this a long time ago because now we have more time to spend together. We now have a routine that my son really likes and extra free time to play together which we never seemed to have had before. Everyone is happie