Hacker News Reader

Comment by glaberficken | Hacker News Reader

At my place (me, my wife, 6yo and 1yo daughters) we have done the same (got rid of our TV about 5 years ago).

We watch the occasional TV show via on demand streaming (guilty pleasure="The Voice", food for thought="several long form journalistic features, tv documentaries etc")

The improvement to our quality of life at home as been significant. In the little free time our daily chores still leave us, we simply play with our daughters (lego, board games, silly play) or read a book with them.

The only concern I have is with the kids growing up. Is the lack of exposure to daily news going to make them less aware of the "world out there"?

After all we could make the choice to live without TV/News after growing up with it. All that news noise is part of our accumulated view of the world. How will this affect someone growing up?

View on HN

Good move. How I counter this news awareness in our house is to actually have discussions with my kids about news that I know they are interested in.

For instance, my younger son is super interested in space and space exploration. Whenever I see a news article or announcement on the web (or even right here on HN), I read up a little about it and then seek him out with a "Hey, did you hear about ...". This often leads to a great discussion, and ends up with us sitting in front of the computer to visit the NASA or ESA websites to get more information, photos or videos direct from the source, without much editorial slant on it.

It's all about piquing their interests, without overloading them with a lot of garbage. They've got enough on their plates with school and social activities etc., so curating their news for them like this is I think useful, plus also leads to some good father/son bonding time where we talk about big ideas like adults.

Thanks, that's great advice.

And if you have the technology to subscribe to video RSS feeds there's news such as:

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/twan_index.html

Only two things to not like about TWAN, coverage of politicians photo ops, and for a weekly show its simply too short.

With 1 daughter in university and 2 in high school, I do something similar, adding in listening to their viewpoints, and asking them critical thinking questions about their views without necessarily disagreeing with them. It doesn't matter whether I agree or disagree, I simply ask them to think for themselves and question the reason they feel the way they do. It's often quite interesting to go into a direction which I had not considered. I've also found flaws in my own views from the exercise.

As may be expected, they also get tired of this sometimes, and they know it's coming, so I try to pick and choose items at random and just let others go. I believe--well hope really, that this encourages them to think and ask questions themselves and not dread another dinner with dad :)

My advice to you would be to get a subscription to a quality newspaper, even if it's only on a weekly basis. Newspapers have come to terms with their position, as last in the news race, so they tend to make up for it with articles pondering the why's of news, rather than the what's. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for, and they will absolutely read a newspaper while eating breakfast, if you leave one out for them.

Yeah I thought about subscribing to a weekly newspaper. The problem is that over here (Portugal) all the weekly news papers are of a particular political "lean". To get a balanced view I would need to subscribe to at least 2 of them.

But I guess as the kids grow older they will inevitably come into contact with the mother of all noise machines... the internet. Then the problem will be to teach them how to filter...

> All that news noise is part of our accumulated view of the world

All that news noise is part of an unreliable, distorted view of the world. The article gave you the solution: read books.

With respect to the kids, its worth looking at the demographics of actual viewers leading to interesting commercial choices where the ads are mostly old people pills and old people cars. Meanwhile the content is aimed, narrowcasting style, right back at the old people to steal old people from other news channels rather than to try and appeal generally, so there's lots of coverage of the 2010s antics (or deaths) of 1970s child TV stars, 60s musicians, and so forth that mean nothing culturally to a 2010s kid.

No 2010s kid is going to get "street cred" socially by walking into school talking about how sick Buicks are and Crestor is awesome and its almost but not quite the 15th anniversary of John Ritter's death.

Don't worry over it, your local school will gladly accept that responsibility for you and play the news of their choice directly to the class room.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com