The family that plays together...

Nickelodeon Study: Families Close, Most Share TV, Activities



I found this article to be very interesting. Growing up, and even now, my family only had one television, and it was in the middle of the living room. We never really fought over it at all, even before we had the DVR, but I remember begging my parents if they would let us get another one. In retrospect, I'm not really sure why I wanted one so badly. I don't watch an awful lot of television to begin with. I think I asked because all of my friends (it seemed) had their own televisions, or at least a second set somewhere in the house.

Did our television keep us close as a family? Well, sometimes it did, but sometimes it didn't. We never really watched movies all together very much, since our tastes differed and we generally couldn't find one thing we all wanted to sit down for the duration of. It seemed that the more we tried to plan for "family TV time" the less likely it was to happen. It was always those nights where someone started watching some History Channel documentary when suddenly the other three would creep in and curl up in the other chairs to watch together.

The article describes how even though it would seem that the technology we now have should pull families apart, they actually in some cases bring families together. Quality time isn't going away, but rather, it is changing, and in some instances this is for the better.