Thinking critically about TV

Parents and teachers around the world are marking TV Turnoff Week – a week-long pause to evaluate the role television plays in kids’ lives. What are kids watching? Is screen time replacing sports, socializing or outdoor fun? Does your family have house rules about TV? Use this week to talk to kids about their favorite medium.

Look below for ideas to mark TV Turnoff Week…

Some Quick Facts In Canada, watching TV is a daily pastime for 75 per cent of boys and girls in grades 3-10. Forty-eight per cent of those students have their own TV set and 35 per cent have their own VCR. Source: Kids’ take on Media, 2003 Recent data shows that TV viewing is declining in young people. Viewers aged 12 to 19 watched an average of 12.9 hours a week of TV in 2004, two hours less than in the year before. This may be due to increased time spent playing comptuer games or on the Internet. Source: Statistics Canada, 2006

Here are some questions to explore with your kids or students:

• Do you think that we view more television than we really need each day?
• Track your viewing habits over the course of a week. How many hours each week do you watch television? Are there any days in which you watch more TV than others? Do you attempt to budget your television viewing? Make a list of programs you and/or your family watch in a week.
• With whom do you discuss the TV programs you watch? Parents? Family? Friends?
• If you were to give up television for a week, which programs would you miss the most? Are some programs more important than others? Are there television programs you would consider to be too important to miss, even for a week?
• Can you think of reasons why watching television could be necessary or helpful for people? What type of television programs would you list as beneficial or important?
• Discuss the relevance of discouraging television viewing.
• Do you think cutting out television entirely would encourage healthier lifestyles? 
• Why do we, as a culture, feel compelled to watch television on a regular basis (for example to schedule our lives to watch the same program week after week, or watch re-runs of the same episode we have seen before?)
• Discuss the following quote:

The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely                                                     -  T.S. Eliot

Activities:

• Brainstorm a list of activities that can be fun substitutes for watching television. Ideas may include: making a friendship bracelet, climbing a tree, attending a local play or sporting event, writing a letter, solving puzzles, crosswords or word searches, taking a walk, a swim, or a bicycle ride, inventing your own game and teaching others how to play, visiting a library, museum or zoo, listening to music, fixing something that is broken, planting a tree, cooking a meal with friends, making costumes out of paper bags, learning about the wildlife in your neighbourhood, writing a play, taking pictures and making a scrapbook, looking at the stars, going skating or roller-blading, learning a card trick, and reading a really good book. During TV Turnoff week, see how many activities from your list you can accomplish.
• Host a storytelling party where everyone has to either tell or perform a story. (You can substitute storytelling with jokes, poems or music.)
• Research family life prior to the invention of television. A fun activity may be to visit a museum or pioneer village to find examples of leisure activities of people who lived in the pre-television era.
• Have your kids to write a story or a series of sketches to perform around the theme of excessive television viewing.
• Create a "TV Turnoff Week" celebration at your school – hold a poster contest or a competition to see which class can come up with the best idea for promoting healthy alternatives to excessive television watching.

Even if your kids or students aren't participating in TV Turnoff Week, you can use this opportunity to take a closer look at the role TV plays in our lives:

• Make it "Plan Your TV Viewing Week": only watch shows you've decided in advance are worth watching -- no channel surfing!
• Keep a TV viewing diary and review it at the end of the week. How much TV did you watch? What were you watching and when? Were you watching alone, or with other people?
• Develop a list of household rules around TV viewing. What purpose should the rules serve? Should everyone in the household follow the same rules?
• For parents, ask your children what their favourite shows are. If you don't already, watch those shows with your children. Ask them what they like about the shows and what messages they're taking from them.