Unusually we do not possess a TV at home, we took the decision upon moving house a few years ago that we would do away with the traditional viewing of TV as a family activity or children babysitter. A number of factors encouraged us in this direction: the house needed work and there wasn’t an obvious place to position the TV, we had noticed too, particularly in our eldest son, a tendency for kids to be so focused on the TV that when it came to switch off time they seemed to struggle to reobtain social skills. If a child is tired then shouldn’t they learn to take time out and rest rather physically rest their body but make their tired brains keep on working to digest tv content? And in our previous home the TV would go on in the evening as soon as the kids were in bed – as a form of relaxation, but most of our adult time spent watching the TV we were on laptops at the same time so it was simply droning away in the background – so why not listen music instead?
I also thought of all the time I had wasted at the end of a school day staring at the TV screen watching neighbours and Home & Away (to name but one useless programme) — WHY??? What did I learn? What could I have learnt if I hadn’t been staring at it all those days, weeks, months? The bad habits continued at University .. Neighbours after lunch – again Why?? It was just a huge distraction preventing me from doing something more useful and it wasn’t as if I didn’t have anything better to do… I certainly watched less tv than many of my peers, whose conversation seem to revolve around various programmes I had never heard of/ wasn’t allowed to watch (!) and I have never suffered from an addiction but I feel relief at having banished the concept of neverending broadcast tv blasting around this household.
Don’t get me wrong we don’t brag about it ( it still makes us social lepers!) and we do watch TV via iplayer and the like but it’s a rare occurrance and WE CHOOSE from the available content what we would like to watch which is a very different concept to growing up in the 80′s… Then when we have watched said programme we don’t go hunting for something else to watch – we turn it off 
Amazing – just like that. Which goes to show you can change your viewing habits.
Plus there are now so many more diverse ways of being electronically entertained than we had in the 80′s: many, many more TV channels, the entire World Wide Web with all it’s information and applications, a vast array of computer games/ gaming systems, access to more films than ever..
Having no TV still freaks people out though, it’s one of those repetitive conversations I have regularly at parties “But how do you cope?” parents demand..