Georgia, Vt. — The numbers are staggering.
In the average U.S. home, the television is on almost eight hours a day. A 1-year-old child watches about six hours a week, and more than half of children 8-to-16 years old have a TV in their bedrooms.
Thomas Begley, 4, excitedly runs into the living room with a comic book while his brothers Jeremiah, 12, background, and William, 10, (not seen) play a card game at their home in Georgia, Vt. Their parents, who also homeschool their children, decided to raise them without television, joining a 2 percent minority of U.S. households without TV.
Those statistics come from the TV-Turnoff Network, the Washington-based organization that organizes National TV Turnoff Week each spring. This year it's April 23-29.
But it won't make much difference to Carol Begley and her family.
A classics scholar married to another Ph.D., Begley wanted to raise her three sons to appreciate a culture more complex than the one presented on the tube. So the family doesn't own a TV at all.
The Begleys are in a minority, to be sure. According to Nielsen Media Research, only 2 percent of U.S. households have no television at all.
Advocates of life without television say its absence is good for children in two distinct ways.
First, children who don't watch TV learn to entertain themselves through creative play, said Gregory Albright, a school teacher in Quechee. "They have their own ideas about what they want to do," said Albright of his three children on a recent snowy day. "They're pretty intensely making igloos in the back yard, and making giant snow caves, and sledding."
They also focus better at school, said Jessica Kobb, another teacher. She has two children in her class with no TV at home.
"They seem to have a broader knowledge of the world around them, because it comes from more sources, and it's not this boiled-down soundbite," she said. "Children in my classroom who don't watch TV seem to know more about a broader range of things. Their parents are out doing things with them; they're out in the world at large more."
And then there's what children see when they do watch TV. Parents who grew up watching TV themselves several decades ago say the content has degenerated in recent years, with more sex, sexism, bad language, off-color jokes and just plain bad manners.
"I'm not a prude, but I really think as a society, we keep stretching all the time what's appropriate and what's OK," said Mary Bryant, who has an 8-year-old daughter and no TV at home.
Like many people without a TV, she gets a taste of what she's missing when she visits relatives.
The commercials bother a lot of people too for the speed with which they send images flashing by on the screen, for their seductiveness and for their success at convincing children what they want or need.
"We were anxious not to have our girls grow up as quickly as seems to be the case in this culture today," said Dulany Gibson, a 46-year-old mother of two in Woodstock who hasn't had a TV in her house in 15 years.
The violence on TV also bothers parents. Last summer, the American Medical Association and three other national groups linked the violence in television, music, video games and movies to increasing violence among children.
And then there's the way TV provides images that might otherwise have come from inside. Albright, 41, who grew up in California watching TV, doesn't want his children to view the characters of classic fables like Snow White through the eyes of an animator.
"If you watch a lot of TV, your image life is built on those prefabricated images by some other artist who has done the creative step," he said.
It's not all bad, though, some TV-turnoff people concede.
"We do let our kids watch the Discovery Channel," said Dean Magarian, the principal of the Flood Brook School in Londonderry and a father of three. "Those (shows) are really educational, and we have some great conversations. The kids have learned a lot from those."
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