Are your talented children’s gifts being wasted by hours upon hours of TV every week? Are you too tired to provide a better example as parents? There are hundreds of ways that we can spend our free time, so if you want to break out of a longstanding TV habit in your home then you need to spend some time investigating the alternatives. Read the five ways to reduce the influence of TV in your home.
Get Outside
Outside, there is more entertainment opportunity and more to learn from than from the screen at home. Take your children exploring on the evenings and weekends, and this will also provide you with an effective way of winding down from work. One great way of making this experience more appealing to younger children is to print off a checklist of all of the wildlife they can look for, and what better way to teach them about the rain cycle or the lifecycle of a frog then by pointing out the frogspawn, or else the clouds, mountains, rivers and the sea? You could even play games outside.
Read a Book
Reading doesn’t have to be a quiet and solitary affair. Get the whole family enraptured with a good book that you can take turns reading aloud in the period of time in which you’d normally watch TV. Choose a good book that’s aimed at the right age for your children, but make sure it’s something you enjoy too. Before you know it, this will become a regular feature of your evenings.
Play the Piano
If your home doesn’t have a piano, you could be missing out on a lot of collaborative fun. If your children are learning any instruments then they’ll be extremely lucky to have a piano to accompany them. This backing could give them the confidence to excel in music but, even if you’re the only musician in the house, having a piano will make all family occasion feel that bit more special. If you have any doubts about which is the right piano for your home than learn more here.
Paint a Picture
One great way of getting your family ready to go without TV is to make sure the home is equipped with the facilities for all kinds of arts and crafts. That means canvases, regular paper, glue, different kinds of paint, pastels, charcoal, as well as more random materials for sculpting and eclectic art. You children will find expressing their imaginative ideas in the ideal form to be an incredibly therapeutic way of winding down at the end of the day.
Discuss
Part of the reason that many people like to spend so much time watching TV is that they find it difficult to conduct and participate in discussions which grow to be as deep or as surface-level as the group allows. Holding interesting conversation is an art which all of us have the ability to possess, assuming we don’t spend too much of our time silently watching the television. Help your family learn to enjoy conversing and sharing aspects of their life with each other.