Box of Evil

Some weeks ago we got rid of the television.
I literally unplugged it and wheeled it out of the house while children wept and rolled on the floor in fits of deprivation and withdrawal. Husband looked on, grim faced, wondering what he would do with those idle hours between 10pm and midnight that he had hitherto spent purposefully switching between our 8 non-cable channels at 40 second intervals while eating stale crackers and elderly trail mix. I tried to explain in a tight voice that when Daddy and I were children we didn’t even have a TV, let alone DVD’s or Dora the Explorer and we were just FINE, look at us now. This caused a brief pause in the wailing to allow for looks of astonishment and disbelief, swiftly followed by withering contempt before the howling resumed at former volume. However, I stuck to my resolve and endured the intermittent tantrums from Four that lasted, surprisingly, for only two days.

Now Four is, and has always been, a person who likes a lot of human interaction. She wants you to play with her and talk to her and follow her extremely complicated rules when playing Dinosaurs-go-to-the-library-for-cupcakes all of the time and she gets very, very annoyed if you even go to the bathroom alone – she considers this to be both the height of rudeness and borderline neglectful parenting. I must confess I had guiltily used the television (only PBS! Only educational DVD’s !) so that I could just have a shower or make dinner or even have 30 minutes to myself occasionally without her needing/wanting something or doing something dubious to her baby brother, One. It was only an hour a day, maximum, so it couldn’t be that bad, right?

Well, it turns out that the television, far from alleviating my problem, was actually adding to it, even in that tiny dose, and it was also starting to turn One into a diminutive zombie, and he had always been a gratifyingly self sufficient little boy, happy to play with a cardboard box and an empty toilet roll for hours at a time.

Once the evil box was gone and the tears had dried, I started to notice that Four was opening her books and looking at the pictures all by herself without asking me to read them to her. She wants to play board games and dig in the garden for worms. Her attention span has grown hugely, to the point where we are reading chapter books as a family in the evening, and she is currently campaigning for us to dig a well in our garden like the Ingalls family in the Little House on the Prairie book (not sure how that will work with our septic system). She instigates games with One that don’t involve picking him up and dropping him (much). She wants to cook dinner WITH me, instead of complaining that eating it is interrupting her viewing schedule, and as a result of the newfound kitchen interest, she has started to eat food that she would never have considered trying previously because she has had a hand in making it. We have experienced a quantum good behaviour leap and an equal diminishment in whining.
I do not miss it at all. Not one bit. It’s never coming back.

Best of all, Husband has now found something more interesting to do in those late evening hours when the children are asleep. ?

Tweet