Train up a Child
My family loves old movies and I am a news guy, so it made sense to get a digital satellite mini-dish system soon after our recent move to the Washington, D.C., area.
There was only one problem. It took me several minutes to get the man behind the counter at the big, blue electronics-and-entertainment superstore to grasp that my needs were actually quite simple. I just wanted a system that hooked up a satellite mini-dish to one television set.
“No problem,” he said, smiling and being patient. Clearly, I was not very well informed about my options in the digital marketplace.
“You know, they make systems now that allow you to use your satellite dish with more than one television,” he explained.
That’s OK, I said. But I just need it to hook up to one television, in one room.
He smiled again, got out a brochure, and proceeded: “Let me show you what everybody gets, these days. It really doesn’t cost that much more to get a system that you can hook up two or three televisions. It used to be hard to do that, but it’s not, now.”
No thank you, I said. I just want to be able to hook up one television set, in one room, in my one house.
Now the salesman was really confused. “Don’t you want to hook up your other TVs? You can get a system that hooks up to the sets in your bedroom and your children’s rooms and everywhere else.”
We don’t own any other TV sets, I explained. We just have one television set, in one room, in our one house, for our one family.
He looked me over. Now he knew what he was dealing with. I was one of those strange folks that are in denial. I was still fighting against the forces of cultural gravity in the modern world. I could hear him thinking: “This is one of those wacky people who think they’re too good to watch TV.”
I could hear him thinking that, so I tried to explain where I was coming from.
Actually, I said, I don’t have anything against TV. I teach courses in journalism and mass media and I sure wouldn’t be trying to teach students how to work in the world of news and entertainment media if I thought it was all rubbish.
Truth is, there’s a lot of good stuff on television. In fact, I think there’s some brilliant stuff on TV. But there also is a lot of garbage. So I try to sit down at the beginning of the week and mark up the TV schedule, so that I know if there’s going to be anything on that we want to watch, as a family, or that I want to tape to watch later. We talk to the kids about this, all the time.
You know that old saying in the Bible, in the Book of Proverbs? “Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
Our family rule is that we try to only watch an hour a day, on tape, usually, or a whole movie every couple of days. We also don’t let our children watch TV alone. That’s the main reason we only have one television and we keep it in the middle of a room that the whole family uses.
In fact, now that we’re getting hooked up to a satellite television service, we know we’re going to have even more media options - for better or for worse.
We want to face those decisions together. We believe that we owe that to our children, because we’re their parents. We don’t want to end up being one of those families in which people end up sitting in separate rooms, watching different shows, on private TVs, speaking different languages, living in their own separate worlds.
Actually, that’s not word-for-word what I said. But that’s what went racing through my mind at the moment, and I did end up saying something like that.
The salesman remained patient. In the end, he smiled and sold me a system that would hook up one satellite receiver to our one television set, in one room, in our one house, for our one family.