Ticked Off Tuesday

Our newspaper just published an article about TV.  Among other things, it stated that the average family watches 58 hours of TV a week, add 20 hours per week to that if you are an African American family.

Is this amazing and unbelievable?  I really, truly cannot fathom watching that much TV in a house.  I did a little estimate of our own house and even by giving lots of leeway to weekend watching, this is what I came up with:

Me - Weeknights - 1.5
         Weekends - 2.5
Husband - Weeknights - 1
                 Weekends - 2.5
Oldest - Weekdays - .5
              Weekends - 1
Youngest - Weekdays - .5
                  Weekends - 1

Grand total  per week? 

Me - 12.5
Husband - 10
Oldest - 4.5
Youngest - 4.5

Grand total for all?  31.5 (pretty sure my math is correct there)

That's slightly more than 1/2 of the national average per family.  This article was only talking about TV, people.  Not screen time in general, by the way.  So it doesn't include computer or video game time. 

I've talked before about my disgust over these numbers and my horror and disbelief that they can be even accurate?  What in the world is going on with people's lives that they make the choice to watch almost 60 hours of TV a week?  If you are awake 16 hours per day, that means your TV is on more than half the time. 

No wonder things like obesity, diabetes, de-sensitivity to violence, laziness, lack of morals, very little family time, poor reading habits and skills and bad health have consumed our country in recent years.  No wonder other countries have passed us academically. 

We're too busy watching TV to even notice.