The Year of Living More With Less: You, Me and the TV

I made a lot of plans for Blue when I was pregnant. We were going to listen to Beethoven everyday. He would only eat organic baby food that I made. And he would not watch any TV until he was at least two. We did not listen to Beethoven everyday. We listened to a lot of Sesame Street and 90's country. I did make his baby food but it certainly wasn't all organic. I did my best but Petersburg, Virginia is not the fresh food oasis that Kansas and Pennsylvania have been. And we did make it until he was 2 before watching TV, although it was days old and not years old. So to my friend, Shana, who rolled her eyes at me when I revealed my baby goals to her, you totally called it.

Blue was fairly mesmerized by the TV at a young age (and by young, I mean his head was propped up in his swing because he wasn't holding it up on his own yet). We watched Baby Genius videos and quite a bit of Daniel Tiger. We watched some Caillou until my ears began to bleed one day and I determined it was the direct result of that kid's voice. Blue was plenty whiny. He didn't need an onscreen personality to further encourage him. But over the years, a lot of PBS Kids shows have served as background noise to our day-to-day lives. His obsessions yo-yo, from Wild Kratts to Sid the Science Kid to Odd Squad. And thanks to on demand, he can watch any episode any time. Neal and I tried to explain to him about what it was like to watch TV when we were growing up. It must have sounded something like I walked five miles uphill, both ways, in 6' feet of snow just to go to school. "Well, son, we could only watch whatever show was on at the time and we only had one TV so we had to agree on what to watch. And we only got to watch cartoons on Saturday mornings." I think we lost him there.

The truth is, distractions of all kinds are available these days. And they aren't the devil. Shows like Wild Kratts taught me, Neal and my mom what a narwhal is. Sid the Science Kid explained water vapor in a way I never could. Daniel Tiger wins the prize for most songs about being nice. (And when a disabled child was in his class this year, Blue simply commented that he had crutches, like Daniel Tiger's cousin, Chrissy.) The iPad has let us watch elephants in the San Diego Zoo and track Santa on Christmas Eve. It has kept him busy during cross-country moves with math games and songs about stinky feet. And it has helped me keep my sanity while in Target because that place is just as magical to a 5 year old as it is to a 40 year old. "No you may not have all those Ninjago LEGO sets. Do you want to watch Word World on my phone?"

I, someone who has never found enjoyment in mindless TV and would be just as happy to sell the TV if it weren't for UK basketball games and Masterpiece Theatre, has certainly set a precedent for watching TV. I've used it as a distraction when I needed to take a shower or wanted 25 minutes of peace and quiet. I've used it as reward for everything from cleaning up the play room to potty training. And we still have movie night every Friday, which means we all fall asleep under the glow of some Disney movie that we've probably already seen at least 3 times. But perhaps most detrimental to our health, is my love of watching TV while eating. It only took one time for Blue to fall in love with this habit, too. So, when he started refusing to eat unless he was watching TV, I knew it was time to make a change.

I searched Pinterest (which is a rabbit hole of parenting techniques) for some way to modify his behavior. I came across the "technology tickets" idea.

There are a slew of mommy bloggers who have put this into practice and were willing to share experiences and free printables. As I read through them, I decided on the rules that made the most sense for us:

1. Every Friday morning (because I finally sat down and printed this all out one Thursday afternoon), Blue receives 14 technology tickets, worth 30 minutes each. They apply to all screens but, honestly, he is on the iPad so infrequently that often when he finally thinks about it, the battery is long-dead. (However, last week he discovered the joy of competition with Mario Kart on the Wii, so that now counts, too.) Anyway, if doled out appropriately, this is one hour of TV per day, which is perfectly acceptable according to most early childhood educators...and about 1/8 the amount of TV that we have been watching. So, there's a fair amount of detoxing involved.

2. To watch TV or play the Wii, he must pull a ticket from the "unwatched" jar and place it in the "watched" jar. Then one of us starts a timer on Alexa (except her name is Echo because I started feeling a little uncomfortable about Blue barking orders at a woman all the time and never saying please or thank you. Although I'm told Alexa doesn't mind. But Mama does.).

3. To watch more TV or play a game after the timer goes off, he must pull another ticket and start another timer. When he is out of tickets, he must earn more.

4. Blue can earn one ticket by doing 30 minutes of reading, writing, math, arts & crafts or helping me around the house. He can also earn tickets by being extra helpful, kind and patient. Or by doing something the first time we ask (like getting in the bath - which, according to him, is his kryptonite or cleaning up his toys - his playroom is literally adjacent to the kitchen. How hard is it?). For the record, in three weeks of doing this, he has never once earned a ticket for doing something the first time we asked.

5. He can lose tickets by being sassy, disrespectful, argumentative or rude. He can also lose them by breaking the house rules: no hitting, no kicking, no screaming, no spitting (yes that eventually had to become a house rule. Boys are so gross.), no biting (again...what??) and no throwing (in anger, but at least he hasn't learned how to slam a door yet).

The first two days were comically confusing. He used nearly all his tickets (yes, that's basically 7 hours of TV each day but I was determined that if he had to learn the hard way, so be it) and he kept trying to move tickets back and forth between jars. At one point, Neal suggested we put a cap on how many tickets he used each day, but I knew that he would figure it out eventually, just like he finally mastered a zipper and how to count by tens. And by the end of the first week, Blue had used all of his tickets but had earned more by drawing an entire zoo of animals, helping me dust and reading 2 Magic Treehouse books. And he did not watch TV one time while he was eating. He didn't even ask.

And that brings us to week 2, which was certainly been a little more lax. With 2 days off school plus one snow day and one day when I worked all day on my magazine deadline, he probably owed us a few tickets. But the dependence on the screen is diminishing. Blue, an only child with more toys than the family of 7 that lives behind us, has finally started to look around for something to play with instead of something to watch. I'm not saying we have been perfect but as long as we strive to be consistent, Blue doesn't fight it. If he's out of tickets, that's a concrete visual. And the threat of taking away tickets has proved valuable when little else seems to motivate him. Likewise, Neal and I dragged him to the National Civil War Museum last week and he was patient and calm the entire time. That earned him two tickets when we got home. I will say this works better if both parents are solidly on-board. It's like one more thing to remember, but it will pay off...eventually.

There are plenty of "Technology Ticket" free printables out there, but most of them are for readers. With Blue still learning sight words, I decided to create my own using clip art from Bing and my Publisher program. I'm not making it available to print because I'm sure that violates about 20 copyright laws, but I will show you what mine looks like so you can make your own. I couldn't find a decent graphic to represent "kind" and "helpful" that didn't involve children holding hands around a globe so I'm hoping this smiley face with a thumbs up gets the point across.

Unless it is a major sports event (every UK basketball game is a major sports event in this house, but also the Super Bowl and when the Louisville City Football Club went to the finals last year) or the next season of The Crown, Neal and I rarely watch TV. Before Blue was born, we spent entire Sundays lying in bed with coffee and bagels, watching HGTV and CNN. Now, it's an hour of TV before bed and Friday night movies. We don't have cable, just a cobbled together set of apps like Sling and Netflix streaming. And I'm OK with this. But the example we set has not been enough to deter Blue and he has taken everything that we have allowed him to get away with. So, for the sake of all of us, we need this. We need limits. We need less TV. And we are all learning to live more with less of it.