Making the Cut: No TV, No Problem (Yet)
Making the Cut is a series on the smart and simple solutions that have (or have not) earned a place in our home.
Executive summary: Between the laptop, tablet, and 2 smartphones, our family of 4 rotates screens depending on what each person is doing. We haven’t felt the need to have a TV since we said goodbye to ours 5 years ago.
We drove down to the spend the week at grandma’s for Thanksgiving break. We keep a stash of toys handy here, plus grandma has a TV that the kids can amuse themselves with. That’s something we don’t have at home – we are among the 3% of American households that don’t own a TV. Maybe this is just one of those Millennial trends like ditching the home landline in favor of individual cell phones, but my husband and I were definitely first cord-cutters and later TV … trashers? It was a long road to get here, though.
This is where the hypothetical TV would go in our living space, but I like it so much more as the kids table/ play area.
Growing up, I never thought twice about having a TV at home. Didn’t everyone have one (or two, or three)? With college came a hiatus from the tube, as I acquired a laptop and with it the ability to watch media on a personal device, and the TV was forgotten for four years. But when my husband and I got married after college graduation and moved into our first official apartment together, what did we do? Immediately reverted to watching everything on a regular TV. We even convinced my MIL to “donate” us a second one that we placed in our bedroom. A second hiatus came when we left most of our belongings behind to move across the country for my MBA. But my mindset was still that a TV is the norm, and not having one while in student mode is a temporary lifestyle adjustment only. So after grad school graduation and moving into our new apartment (round 2), we once more picked up a TV and placed it front and center in our living room. (At least we kept it to one this time, as I’d learned my lesson that we rarely ever watch TV in the bedroom.)
I would say I started my “minimalist journey” on a conscious level in the years following b-school. Before that, we never had that much stuff, but it was more because we were living in small spaces, and not because I was really intentional about paring things down. But now, after our seventh move in a decade, it wasn’t making sense to me anymore to pack and unpack everything repeatedly on autopilot. That’s when I started looking carefully at our routines and assumptions to identify possessions that were duplicative or rarely used. The TV survived my scrutiny for a while yet, and it wasn’t until I decided that I wanted to create a play area for our new baby that I looked at the TV corner and wondered if we really “needed” it. I decided that since all we did was stream (coming far from our Blockbuster DVD rental days in college), we could make do with a laptop. That was five years ago and I haven’t missed our TV at all.
Even with two kids now, we haven’t found a need to bring a TV into our home (yet). There are currently four screens in our household — that’s enough for each person to claim one device at a time. Our kids rotate between the laptop, tablet, and our phones depending on what they’re doing/ watching. I do wonder if we’ll feel differently if the kids want to play videogames or watch movies as a family when they’re older. My son has played some simpler games on the tablet, but he has a lot of fun with the Nintendo Switch when we visit others. Will we want to make that a family activity one day? I’m leaving open the possibility, and we’ll ask the question again if/when it becomes relevant.
We’ve got enough screens to go around for now, sans TV.
On a tangential but related note, you can tell that I obviously don’t oppose screentime for my kids, a parenting topic that seems to cause much contention and guilt. We followed the AAP’s (now old) guidelines with my son: he didn’t see anything on a screen (with the exception of video calls with grandma) until he was nearly two. And whaddaya know, he watched his first video, and he started talking. Like magic, after never having uttered a word in his life. Correlation or causation? We’ll never know. We didn’t even bother withholding the screen from my daughter, not when she could see her brother watching a show and wanted to get in on the action (this is true of many things when it comes to second/subsequent children: it becomes nearly impossible to prevent the younger one from being exposed to whatever the older one has/does). In truth, she has learned so much from Miss Rachel on YouTube in particular (words, signing, songs, dancing), ever since she was 1yo. We’ve honestly been blown away, and it reinforces my belief that we shouldn’t villainize screens. Plus, by not making screentime a scarce and therefore highly coveted resource, we’ve seen our kids self-moderate — yes, my 5yo and 2yo will reject screentime in favor of other toys and activities, of their own volition. We may be a no-TV family, but we are certainly not a no-screentime family. But as always, to each their own — our own may just be a bit different from 97% of American households.