How My Kids' Education Blew Up My TV Addiction

I’d hated school, but this kindergarten gave me hope. The children played outside almost all morning, then lined up their muddy boots in the hall, washed their hands, and helped make bread. They played with woolly, formless dolls, made tents from plant-dyed cloths, and sang little songs about gnomes. This school seemed like it might be heaven on earth for my son.

The catch: in 1999, a decade before the first smartphones, before the debate around “screen time” became commonplace, the teacher interviewing my husband and me told us we would have to eliminate TV from our home.

Sure, we said, glibly. South Park. Twin Peaks. Geraldo and Dr. Phil, Jeffrey Dahmer documentaries. We figured they meant grown-up TV.

But they meant no children’s TV. Not even Sesame Street. Very young children, the teacher said, need to move around in gravity and to use their senses to learn the world. Television is a distraction at best, and if used to replace human interaction, it could be harmful.

We nodded. Okay, that made some sense. Let our child come to know the natural, sensory world before the virtual one. Nourish his imagination with stories told by humans in the flesh.

So why did I feel as if someone had just died?

Letting go of Sesame Street felt like letting go of myself. In the 1970s, Sesame Street held up my childhood world. My father was a first-generation American and my mother an immigrant Filipina. Both worked all day, he as a real estate broker and she as an anesthesiologist. Often, my mother worked through the night too. My sister and I had a babysitter 24 hours a day, five days a week, and in the afternoons while tidying, she sat us in front of Sesame Street.

The Muppets were my little pantheon of benevolent storytelling gods. Big Bird the gentle, giant fool, with his floofy, bright-yellow feathers. Oscar the Grouch added gravitas. Cookie Monster made chaos seem predictable. Grover found pathos in everything. And Ernie and Bert reminded us that even best friends didn’t have to get along perfectly. In a family that had no deep roots in America, Sesame Street formed my first sense of Americanness.

I carried this into mothering. Before the kindergarten interview, Sesame Street had played as my son ate his midmorning snack. But when we went home after enrolling at the school that day, we did not turn on the TV.

Surprisingly, our child, who’d played outside with others whose families were considering enrollment, didn’t seem to notice any difference in the routine. We still had bathtime and sang songs while he and his brother shook their sillies out. He was happy.

To avoid the habit of turning on the TV going forward, we just got rid of it. We replaced it with a fish tank. The tank had a similar blue glow, but we could say good night to the fish with the kids and when we turned off the light it still emitted a comfortable bubbling sound. Real air rising through real water.

When we eliminated TV, I realized how much I’d feared the world beyond Sesame Street –– no wonder I’d hated school. Letting go of Sesame Street was like blowing out the cathode ray tube that stood in for goodness in the world of my childhood. But now, I could step through that empty tube into something new. I’d help my child to learn trust before he learned fear. We could huddle together during a storm and tell stories about thunder. We could pull dandelions and make pancakes with the new blooms.

We could find goodness in the world together.