Step Away From the Screen

"...please, oh please, we beg, we pray,

Go throw your TV set away,

And in its place you can install

A lovely bookshelf on the wall.

Then fill the shelves with lots of books,

Ignoring all the dirty looks,

The screams and yells, the bites and kicks,

And children hitting you with sticks"

--Roald Dahl

from "Television"

***

When my daughter Frances was in kindergarten, I helped rally the class to participate in National TV Turnoff week. The kids buried a TV in books, they ate a TV (a TV shaped cake), and I wrote and taught them a song about all the things they could do instead of watch TV. It was a fun week at school. At home, it was a week like any other for Frances. We did not own a TV.

Some of my old friends will start groaning about now. They're thinking, uh oh. Here she goes again. The crazy lady with the "Turn Off TV. Turn On Life" bumper sticker on her minivan is back. God help us. -- Well, if she's back it's with her tail between her legs. Friends, I'm here to tell you, we are in a losing battle with screen time at our house these days. The Internet is ruling the roost.

We still don't have cable TV, and we currently only have one computer in our house. But when the four of us are home, that computer is rarely at rest. Miles plays Minecraft, Frances scrolls through Tumblr posts or watches Dr. Who episodes, Paul feeds his news addiction, and I wander through the time sucking world of facebook. It is harder and harder to find an evening where no one is either on the computer, waiting for the computer, fighting over the computer, or complaining that I won't let them on the computer. This addiction to the Internet kind of crept up on us. Rules were set, bent, and finally broken and ignored. And it's not just the kids.

Now, I do not think the Internet is evil, anymore than I think the library is evil for housing books I don't like or agree with. We use the Internet for worthwhile ventures too. Frances has taken an interest in British TV dramas, Miles feeds his hunger for scientific information, Paul keeps up with the NY Times, and I get to write and share a blog. What pains me is when my children act as if there is nothing else to do when we are at home. Or when they will choose the Internet over going outside on a beautiful sunny day. 

When my kids were little and we didn't have a TV, I almost never heard them say they were bored. And on the rare occasions they did, they used their imaginations to pull themselves out of the doldrums. Boredom is not a condition to be avoided at all cost. It can be the birthplace for creativity. I worry that, for all of us, the Internet is our drug of choice for coping with boredom. I worry about what it might do to wonder and imagination.

In Norton Juster's classic children's novel, The Phantom Tollbooth, young Milo returns from his adventure and discovers a world that has been waiting for him all the time. This is what I don't want my children to lose. This is what I don't want to lose either:

"Outside the window, there was so much to see, and hear, and touch--walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden. There were voices to hear and conversations to listen to in wonder, and the special smell of each day.

And in the very room in which he sat, there were books that could take you anywhere, and things to invent, and make, and build, and break, and all the puzzle and excitement of everything he didn't know -- music to play, songs to sing, and worlds to imagine and then someday make real."  

We shouldn't fear boredom. If we stick it out, imagination will come to our rescue.