No TV September was a success. It was also a failure in a lot of ways. And I think that’s probably why I’m glad we did it.
When we started this challenge, one of my biggest goals was pretty simple: I wanted my boys to get better at playing independently. I didn’t expect them to suddenly entertain themselves for hours. But I wanted them to be able to go into a room, find something to do, and play without needing Mom or Dad involved every second. When we started No TV September, we didn’t know exactly what the month would expose.
At first, that went terribly.
They didn’t want to play by themselves. They wanted my wife or me there with them constantly. Taking TV away didn’t magically make them independent. Instead, it exposed the fact that they didn’t really know what to do when we weren’t entertaining them.
And honestly, sometimes we didn’t know what to do either.
The Tiny Timer That Made a Big Difference
One of the simplest things we tried ended up helping more than I expected. We found a little visual timer with buttons for 1, 3, 8, 10, and 15 minutes. We would turn it on and give the boys a small amount of time to play independently.
That was it. We weren’t telling them to disappear for an hour. We were giving them something they could see and understand. A few minutes. Then we’d come back.
That little timer became a breakthrough. Independent play didn’t suddenly become easy, but it started becoming possible.
We also learned that sometimes telling our kids, “Go play,” wasn’t enough. If they were bored, one of us could go into the room with them, start building something or get a game going, and then slowly step away. A lot of times, they just kept playing. By two weeks without TV, that shift was already starting to show.
That sounds incredibly simple now. But before this month, we weren’t doing it.
Then the Library Took Off
The library became one of the biggest surprises of the entire challenge. Without TV waiting at home, we needed other things to fill that space.
Books became a much bigger part of our house. We started making regular library trips and bringing home new books and Tonies. The novelty helped. There was always something different for the boys to discover.
We read a lot this month. Sometimes sitting down and reading book after book was challenging. Other times it became one of my favorite parts of the day.
Then I started noticing something. Sometimes I’d walk into a room and find one of my boys sitting there looking through a book by himself. Nobody told him to. There wasn’t a screen competing for his attention. He was just looking at a book.
I don’t think that happens nearly as often in our house if we don’t do this challenge.
Not Everything Got Better
Here’s where the nice story about a screen-free month falls apart a little. Taking away TV didn’t suddenly make our kids stop fighting.
In some ways, their imaginative play became more intense. My older son loves pretending to be a firefighter. But he also has a very specific idea in his head about everything he needs to be a firefighter.
If something was missing, we had a problem. If his little brother had something he believed belonged with his fire equipment, we had another problem. That became one of our regular battles this month.
More imaginative play sometimes meant more opportunities for conflict. There were still meltdowns. There was still fighting. There were still plenty of moments when parenting two little boys was exhausting.
No TV September didn’t fix those things.
But It Forced Us to Deal With Them
This might have been the most important part of the entire experiment.
Before September, TV could be an easy answer. The kids are fighting. Turn something on. Everyone is melting down. Turn something on. Dad and Mom need a few minutes of peace. Turn something on.
I don’t think TV is bad. We’re bringing it back. But looking back at our own family, I think we had sometimes started using it as a Band-Aid for problems we hadn’t learned how to handle yet.
When the Band-Aid wasn’t available, we had to figure some things out.
If the boys were fighting, we learned that sometimes we needed to separate them and give everyone time to cool down. If they were bored, we learned that telling them to “go find something to do” wasn’t always enough. Sometimes they needed us to help them get started.
So we’d enter their play, get something going, and then gradually leave.
We also started paying more attention to meltdowns instead of trying to make them disappear. The meltdowns didn’t go away. But their ability to recover from them seemed to improve. And our ability to handle them improved too.
We started developing actual systems for situations that previously felt like chaos. That’s something I didn’t expect when we turned the TV off.
The Kids Weren’t the Only Ones Changing
My wife and I had habits around TV too. There were times when we relied on it because we needed downtime. That’s understandable. Parenting little kids is exhausting.
But September gave us a hard rule: we’re not doing that this month.
And somehow, we did it. That surprised both of us.
It also made me wonder where else we could do the same thing. What other habits in our parenting or our relationship have we accepted simply because that’s how we’ve always done them? What would happen if we occasionally drew a line and said, “For the next month, we’re going to try something different?”
We don’t have all those answers yet. But No TV September showed us that we’re capable of changing more than I thought.
So Are We Getting Rid of TV?
No.
I’m actually excited to bring one part of it back: Movie Fridays.
I enjoy them. My boys enjoy them. Sitting together and watching a movie feels different to me than simply turning on the TV because nobody knows what else to do. I can’t wait for our first Movie Friday after the challenge.
What we haven’t decided is exactly what the rest of our TV rules will look like. We’ve talked about using TV as a reward. We’ve talked about limiting it to around 30 minutes per kid. We haven’t made the final decision.
But I know what we’re not doing. We’re not reaching October 1, turning the TV back on, and immediately returning to everything we were doing before September.
That would miss the entire point.
Would I Do No TV September Again?
Yes.
Not because it transformed my kids. Not because our house suddenly became peaceful. And definitely not because we became perfect parents.
I’d do it again because it exposed things. It showed us where our kids needed help learning to play independently. It showed us how much they enjoy books when we make room for them. It showed us that imaginative play can create its own problems.
It showed us that meltdowns weren’t something we always needed to distract our way out of. And maybe most importantly, it showed my wife and me some of our own habits.
Turning off the TV didn’t solve our parenting problems. It made some of them harder to ignore.
And that might have been the most successful part of No TV September.
Dads, let’s go.
Keep Reading No TV September
Start with why we turned off the TV, see what changed after two weeks, and read how the library became one of the biggest surprises of the experiment.
