To be annoyed by the smugness of some parents who have TV-free homes?

[marfisa]

A friend/colleague of mine boasted posted on her facebook (in connection with World Book Day) that her DC's imaginations "run free" because they have never been allowed to watch telly or play on games consoles. As a result (she says) they love to read! and they run round the house pretending to be ancient Egyptians!

It isn't the first time she has made comments like this and it always irks me. I have to refrain from posting a snarky response along the lines of, "My DS watches telly AND owns a Nintendo DS. Yet amazingly, his imagination still manages to run free!" In fact, we are a bookish household and he loves to read. Yet he has also been infatuated at various points with Ben10/Power Rangers/Dr Who/Club Penguin/Moshi Monsters/Pokemon and I see NOTHING wrong with this. How narrow-minded does a parent have to be in order to think that telly and computer games can't nourish a child's imagination as well? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating UNLIMITED telly and gaming. I don't even have a problem with families not owning a TV (I know a number of families who don't, and I'm sure their DC are surviving just fine). I just think that fostering love of books is much more about having lots of books around than about banning TV and Nintendo altogether. And I'm sick of the implication that the more telly your DC watch, the less imagination they will have. Pop culture can be pretty damn amazing. If you want to restrict your kids' access to it, fine, but don't be all pretentious about it. Impersonating a Time Lord does not necessarily involve less imagination than impersonating an ancient Egyptian. end rant

We pay the licence fee, mainly because we know we want to reconnect for the Olympics and wouldn't want the hassle of reapplying. After that, maybe we will cancel it. Since getting my new job we don't really use iplayer anymore anyway, and don't use BBC radio. There should be an 'iplayer only' licence, perhaps.

But Bennifer, they are free to view as long as you don't watch them live. Same as all the other channels.

I would gladly mortgage my house to pay for a TV licence.

My seven year old probably watches too much TV if I'm honest. He also loves to read and was completely obsessed with Ancient Egypt for a whole year. Tell your friend to put that in her pipe and smoke it!

We have friends a bit like this, Op. The amount of times they say things like 'omg how many tellies do you have in your house' and 'we have sooo many other things to do as a family we would never have the time to watch it' and ' our dc are far too tired after being outside all day..' yadda yadda bullshit bullshit. Meanwhile, their 3 dc are like Charlie in Choc Fact film with his little face pressed up against the sweet shop window, desperate to go in.

Hilariously though, the Dad is a massive football/rugby fan and with monotonous regularity my dh looks at his watch and says 'x will be 'passing' shortly on his mountain bike with the family and pop in to see x football/rugby match on Sky Sports 1 HD us for a coffee'

YANBU it annoys me too. There's a fair few like that round here and I don't know why they feel the need to label themselves. Having a telly in the house still means they don't have to be glued to it the whole time.

Also, if she has a laptop I bet they're allowed to watch films, YouTube etc etc.

blackteaplease, it might be legal, but at the same time, it just seems morally wrong

I think YABU because it's the whole facebook thing that's the issue. I don't do facebook, but it's the nature of the whole thing isn't it? People boring the pants off each other with irrelevant, sometimes boasty, often tedious banalities:
"I've just made a cake"
"My child just did their first ever fart"
"Here are some more photos of ME, don't I look gorgeous?"
YAWN.

I love telly.
There is a bit of snobbery around having/watching TV, and yet it's true that all those who claim to never watch telly are always watching stuff on the computer, which is wrong.

We had a black and white TV with a dial until I was about ten! (and this was in the 80's), so I love my giant colour telly.

YANBU.

My kids run round pretending to be Egyptians all the time. Generally because they are re-creating Dr Who and the Pyramids of Mars.

Joins mojitomania in the naughty corner as i couldn't live without our xxl cable package and 3 tivo boxes.
My oldest boy has mutiroom instead of cash pocket money and at nearly 16 has unlimited access to plenty of crap tv. I haven't noticed him growing a second head or anything yet.

When my ds was at our tiny primary school, the kids were lucky to have the utter freedom that only living in a tiny Highland village can bring.
There was one rather woo family that was the only one without tv, and guess who was the only one who demanded to watch tv when he was at the other's houses, instead of going out to play.
Who knows, maybe had too much imagination at home.
The family moved and he's now at a Steiner school.

We don't have a TV (no children yet) and have had some very weird responses, which to be honest really gobsmacked me, as I wasn't expecting them. I've never in my life 'boasted' about not having a TV - we didn't have one at home when I was growing up until I was older (poverty, not ideology!), so I think I just never formed the habit.

It probably came up in conversation because people talk about TV a lot, and were clearly puzzled and asked questions when I kept saying I hadn't seen it when they asked what I'd thought of programme X. People appeared to think they were being judged - something similar happens sometimes if it comes out that I'm vegetarian - when it's the last thing on my mind, to be honest.

I find myself wondering sometimes whether some people have some internalised sense of guilt about watching TV/ or'too much' TV that makes them imagine that someone who hasn't got one is judging them harshly...?

I hate the tv and wish we didn't have it.. I do think it has had a negative effect on DS and I don't buy into the 'it's educational' argument..

Unfortunately my husband has decided that watching tv is his 'hobby' so the bloody thing isn't going anywhere..

I'm suspicious of people who don't watch TV in the same way I'm suspicious of people who don't read books

Wow that is smug, but I think I would be too if I had said NO to TV.

I had the same thing as HardCheese - when I first moved to the UK I didn't have/couldn't afford a tv so missed out on all the Wife Swap (!) conversations as a consequence.. I found out later that I'd been branded a 'snob' and 'smug' because I didn't have a tv!

Thanks for all the funny / insightful responses.

To the people who said YABU, why is this annoying you so much?, you are actually quite perceptive, because I am now starting to realise that at least part of the reason it annoys me so much is because I wasn't allowed to watch TV as a child and my parents made a huge fuss about it. (Sorry - am embarrassed to be drip feeding. I sort of convinced myself it wasn't relevant but it probably is!) I don't think growing up without a TV was a big issue in itself really (although I did feel left out sometimes when other children chatted about TV). What was problematic was my mum's attitude that her DC were BETTER than other DC because we weren't allowed to watch telly. The holier-than-thou aspect of it all didn't actually endear us to other families. So that is why I am EXTRA annoyed now as a grownup I suppose!

As for this friend, though, this is only one in a long series of updates along the lines of "Johnny and Freddie have never been inside a McDonalds once. In fact, they don't even recognise the logo! I'm so proud". And so on. Even though I'm no fan of McD, it makes me grind my teeth.

Also, she thinks her DC's school is wasting time with activities like craft and playtime. Because children have to be learning in a traditional style during the entire school day or they are not really learning. So she says that school is like a holiday for them and all the real hard work of learning she has to do with them herself at home. My own DS seems to be learning at the school just fine.

The thing is, she is a clever and interesting person, and I like a lot of things about her. It's just her approach to parenting that pushes all my buttons for some reason.

LOL at LadyBeagle! That kid would have been me when I was little.

I've never experienced any of this smuggery in RL! And as I said earlier I don't feel like anyone in RL has judged me, either. I guess everyone at work (or school run mums, or whoever) has different tastes anyway so I certainly wouldn't be the only one who hadn't seen suchnsuch.

People have expressed more surprise when I've said I don't have a car (can't afford one) or a dishwasher (ditto) than when I've said we don't watch broadcast telly.

yanbu, if people don't have tv fine that's up to them but can get annoying when they are overly smug about it.
i know quite a few tv free people, but one of their dd was at my house and it just struck me how the other dc were running off to play but this dc from tv-free house was sat there glued to the telly and also told adults to "be quiet" so she could watch it! which i think is quite rude to do, despite that mum also claimed on another occasion that this girl is "literally never naughty" - personally i class telling adults to be quiet so you can watch the tv as quite rude and could be seen as naughty, i wouldnt let my dc do it!!
people may brag about no tv and these kind of things but it does not always paint the full picture. i'm always skeptical when people like to paint a pic of themselves and kids as being perfect as it's rarely true, noone is perfect so why not just be honest
my dc watch tv, maybe a bit too much, but i dont see it as a huge issue. it does not hamper their imagination, mine are very imaginative

What strikes me about the smuggery (ooh I love that word :o) I read about on here is that perhaps for these people, Not Having TV is this really Big Deal. Why? Why the need to make a fuss about something they don't have?

Whereas everyone I know without an aerial, well, they just don't have one and it doesn't come up unless somebody asks.

I think it's the smugness of the lady in question, rather than the lack of TV, which you are finding annoying?

I judge dim-witted, self-aggrandising, insecure pillocks who tit about on facebook all day.

(my children don't watch tv bar the odd film, but only you lot reading this know that....)