We don’t own a TV. Does that make us weird?

If you want a conversation stopper, try telling people you don’t own a TV.

I don’t exactly walk around with a sign hanging around my neck. But the reality is, it takes about twenty minutes in most social situations to get to “Can you believe what happened on the last episode of X?”

The first couple of times, I say, “No, I missed that. What happened?”

After awhile, though, people catch on.

“Well, if you’ve never seen X, Y, or Z, what the heck do you watch?”

At that point, I have to come clean and admit it. Our family belongs to the 1-to-2-percent of TV-free Americans that don’t spend an average of 8 hours a day plugged into corporate programming. In other words, we're weird even by homeschool standards.

People’s reactions are pretty predictable. First, they list all the educational programs they watch (apparently there are a lot of people out there hanging onto every word of Animal Planet and How Stuff Works). Next, they ask what we do. (“My God,” one mother commented. “Do you, like, read all the time?”)

Finally, they ask the Big Question: Why? Why are we denying ourselves free entertainment and a window into the “real” world and—worse—why are we choosing to deny K-S all those important educational programs? (Homeschoolers, interestingly, seem the most shocked that we’re not plunking K-S down in front of Disney’s Baby Einstein or Dora the Explorer--the pre-school version, not the newly announced, stylish, shopping-crazy tween Dora.)

Why we pulled the plug

I’m hardly an ascetic. There was a time when I planned my Sunday evening around Desperate Housewives and shouted back at the set when Project Runway was on. (God, how I loved Project Runway.)

But overall, TV just kept getting stupider and stupider, with a bigger and bigger noise-to-signal ratio. There came a day when my husband and I just looked at each other and said, No more. (Okay, how it actually went down was I said, What do you say we get rid of the idiot box, and he said, You mean it's still plugged in? That man never did appreciate Tim Gunn.) We figure that statistically speaking, we only have another two or three decades left on terra firma. That’s best-case scenario. And a third of that time, we plan to sleep. Do we really want to spend the few precious topside hours we have left watching The Osbournes?

All this played out before K-S came along, although I like to think that I would have kicked the TV to the curb as soon as I read the American Academy of Pediatrician’s admonition to ban TV for twos and under. Study after study has shown that putting kiddos in front of a screen leads to everything from relatively mild issues like sleep problems and obesity to biggies like AD/HD and the inability to learn, and frankly, is this a big surprise?

Interestingly, study after study has also shown that parents don’t care.

These days, when we’re at a friend’s house or vacationing in a hotel room and flip on the TV out of curiosity after K-S hits the hay, the things that hit us over the head are the proliferation of senseless-murder-related plots on the dramas; the nasty-spirited, back-talking, low-achieving characters on the comedies; the glut of “reality” shows that appear to have replaced professionally executed narrative; and the endless advertisements for drugs and cars.

None of this is beneficial to K-S who, neurologically speaking, is constructing a picture of the world that will underpin every aspect of her adult life.

Some day—when she’s older—we can talk about Animal Planet. Right now, I’d rather have her get her finger bitten by Nature than watch it on a one-way flickering screen.