It’s not that we never watch television, but we minimize TV watching in our house.
Mostly, we don’t have time to watch television (hello? Have you seen how much I blog and tweet and facebook! LOL!). We want to spend our free time with family, hobbies, and outdoor activities instead of television.
When we watch TV, we like the occasional family movie from Netflix or Redbox and maybe once or twice a week, a news channel (I hate news because it’s so depressing!!). Sometimes hubby catches up on sports. All together we watch less than 10 hours of TV a week. That is a generous estimate; some weeks I watch NONE.
That said, we recently got a new flat screen television (not a big one) because our television set is about 15 years old, and not digital. We wanted a better picture and access to Netflix via Roku for convenience. Did you know you can get a Roku-ready TV!? That’s what we did! We don’t have cable TV anymore because between Netflix and Amazon Prime, we have more than enough TV in our life!
We had considered a TV wall mount. But we didn’t want the focus of the room to be the big screen. Because if the TV is out there, then we’re prone to flop down and watch it!
We decided to keep the focus away from the television by storing it a TV armoire. This way it’s out of sight, and generally out of mind! If you’re looking to hide your television and other audio-visual equipment, I’d suggest checking out the attractive TV armoires on the market! Ours even has doors so we can close it up. We prefer having an entertainment cabinet that looks like part of the furniture/decor, so we can “unplug” without the electronics being in our face while we converse or play with the baby.
Our 15-month-old pretty much doesn’t know what a TV is (although if the cabinet is open, he loves to push all the DVD buttons!). He does not see TV as a form of entertainment yet. Our preference is to keep our children as TV-free for as long as possible!
I know keeping him TV-free forever isn’t realistic. So in the future, we’ll have to modify our family rules, I’m sure. Which makes me curious about how other families manage TV time.
How do you handle television watching in your family? Do you set limits or have tech free days?
Here’s a post about how to talk to kids about technology, setting limits and avoiding over-doing it!
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T Rex Mom
Sunday 5th of June 2011
You know my thoughts on this.
We however, deviated a bit this past week so our son could watch Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood during the day. He checked it out from the library and since she's pretty much awake when he is, I had to make an exception for him to watch it. I'll be writing a posting about this in the next few days so stay tuned. But it was only about 25 minutes of watching for her and she enjoyed it. They both did.
We haven't watched much in the way of shows this week - too many other fun things going on. People often ask me how I do everything that I do. Well, no TV, only a few shows, and limited online time - lots of time for everything else. Multitasking helps too.
Nice posting - I enjoyed how your incorporated the sponsor into this, too.
T Rex Mom
Sunday 5th of June 2011
You know my thoughts on this.
We however, deviated a bit this past week so our son could watch Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood during the day. He checked it out from the library and since she's pretty much awake when he is, I had to make an exception for him to watch it. I'll be writing a posting about this in the next few days so stay tuned. But it was only about 25 minutes of watching for her and she enjoyed it. They both did.
We haven't watched much in the way of shows this week - too many other fun things going on. People often ask me how I do everything that I do. Well, no TV, only a few shows, and limited online time - lots of time for everything else. Multitasking helps too.
Nice posting - I enjoyed how your incorporated the sponsor into this, too.