. . . And Can You Survive Without TV? : Yes, but If You Want to Find Out, an Expert Urges a Tubeless Week

About 20 years ago, a Manhattan mother was parking her two preschoolers in front of the television set when she suddenly felt compelled to take a closer look. Not at the set. At the kids.

While 5-year-old Mike and 3-year-old Steve took in “The Flintstones” and “I Love Lucy,” their mother tuned in to their slack jaws, glazed eyes and dazed expressions.

“They seemed zonked out, almost like zombies,” Marie Winn recalls. “I thought, ‘This is a little weird. This isn’t the way they look in normal life.’ ”

From those casual observations, a career was born.

First came long years of research, followed by the publication in 1977 of “The Plug-In Drug,” Marie Winn’s landmark book alerting parents to the dangers of television addiction in children.

Now, 10 years later, after more research, comes “Unplugging the Plug-In Drug,” a guidebook for fearless parents and adventurous children who want to take part in a daring experiment: surviving a week without television.

Publicity Push

Accompanying the new book will be the sort of hoopla that generally surrounds “major publishing events,” as publicists like to call them. Already, there are press kits and buttons and lists of schools and libraries planning to participate in what Viking/Penguin Books has dubbed “No-TV November.”

Winn is excited at the prospect of additional Americans discovering the world beyond the tube. At the prospect of being viewed as a Carry Nation for the ‘80s, she is less than thrilled. “I’m very eager not to be seen as a fanatic anti-TV type,” she says wearily.

For the record, Winn does own a television set that, on occasion, has been tuned in to “Dynasty.” She likes “L.A. Law” and “Hill Street Blues.” And never once has she suggested that all TV sets be banished.

“I believe in it as an entertainment and a relaxant,” she says. “I believe that it’s less damaging than Valium.”

Previous TV Turnoffs in Denver and New York provided the grist for the new book--Winn’s 12th volume for parents and children. It offers everything from tips for selling the idea to addicted adults (“You mean we would have to turn it off too?” one teacher demanded) to survival hints for families about to take the plunge.

Excerpts from the diaries of televisionless children shed light on the magnitude of the problem. (“When I come home I cannot stand it ,” writes one hardened little addict. “Dear Diary: I feel like I’m dying!” says another. “I gotta watch TV! But I won’t!”)

Amid the recipes for finger paint and play clay and alongside the sample No-TV contracts is a serious message: Too much television can be hazardous to family life, not to mention reading, homework, parental problem-solving and all manner of creative endeavors.

Impact on Americans

“It’s a quality-of-life issue,” says Winn, who believes that excessive television-watching has had a noticeable impact on American life.

Parents who use television as electronic baby sitters often fail to develop effective ways of shaping their children’s behavior, she says. And children who spend too much of their time parked in front of the set, she adds, fail to develop the resources, skills and interests that can lead to enriching careers or hobbies in adulthood.

Very young children also may find their verbal development stunted for the simple reason that families engaged in watching television are not talking to each other, she says. It is by participating in conversations--not merely observing them--that toddlers develop verbal skills.

“People don’t think about television in a lucid way,” Winn says. “It’s just there, from your earliest days. Obviously, one week without television can’t change people’s lives, but it can start them thinking differently.”

A successful TV-Turnoff, to Winn, brings about “insight and illumination about television. In some families, it’s a confirmation of what they already practice and believe. For others, the impact is that they begin to understand the need to control it better.”

The experiments also enable families to discover new activities, “to do some of the things you don’t normally do because you spend too much time watching TV. To see that there are gratifying ways to spend your time.”

She didn’t always view television as a mind-altering drug. In the early days of her marriage to Academy Award-winning documentary film maker Allan Miller, formerly a conductor, evenings at home often included “The Danny Kaye Show” or “Mission: Impossible.”

After long, tiring workdays, the couple would sometimes settle in for what Winn calls “a cozy little junk watch.”

Later, as a young mother, “I used to watch ‘Lucy’ with the kids. I remember turning on shows I thought were OK for them to watch, and plugging them in. Then, I began to observe my use of television with the kids, and the way they were watching.

“My kids, when they watched TV, seemed different from when they played or slept. They looked hypnotized.”

From the beginning, it wasn’t what her kids watched but how much that Winn viewed as significant. While she was also concerned about the worthwhile activities--reading, music, homework--that were displaced by television viewing, it was primarily “the one-way nature of television” that bothered her.

“The kind of attention you pay to it is different from two-way activities,” she says. “There are a variety of children with a variety of vulnerabilities. Obviously, not every child gets hooked. But often you find at least one of these in a family--the child who seems to zero in with excessive attention on the tube. The child who wants to watch too much, who is hard to distract while watching.”

Like any concerned ‘60s mother, Winn turned to the child-care experts for advice. But most of the books and magazine articles she found focused on content, there was little about the act of watching television.

Did Own Research

For solid research, she decided, she would have to do her own.

Not long after that, the lone TV set in the household went on the blink. It was never repaired but was replaced some years later.

“There’s a lot more empty time in your lives without TV,” Winn says. Her children filled theirs with word games and puzzles, music and books. How did their mother manage to write books at home without relying on television to keep her kids occupied?

“Naps,” she says firmly. “I’m a strong believer in naps.”

Today, son Steve is a professional violinist. Mike is a journalist who, as a teen-ager, was already a published author. His book, “Beyond Crossword Puzzles,” a volume of original word games, was an outgrowth of a course he taught at the New School as a 15-year-old.

In discussing “the television thing,” as Winn has come to refer to it, “I hate to make myself an example,” she says. “I’m a different case.”

And so she is.

A Literate Family

Winn moved to New York from Prague, Czechoslovakia, at age 2 with her mother, a lawyer, and her father, a neurologist and a poet who also wrote a literary column in his native language. Her sister, Janet Malcolm, writes for the New Yorker magazine.

“It’s not just chance that we both became writers,” says Winn. “In our home education, great emphasis was placed on words. Our dinner-table conversations were about etymology, meanings, rhetorical devices. Later, my own family played huge amounts of word games and palindromes.”

Winn and her husband live in an Upper West Side apartment where they reared their children. Old family portraits are displayed on a grand piano, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are lined with the classics. The European intellectual decor seems an ideal backdrop for Winn, avant-garde in her woven cotton dress and bare feet, graying hair and tortoise-shell reading glasses.

Between books, she contributes pieces to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and translates Russian and Czechoslovakian literature. Weekends are spent at the couple’s televisionless country house in Upstate New York.

In her interviews with thousands of American families, Winn did find some who concluded their No-TV experiments by deciding to give up television for good. Others have adopted new rules banning television on school nights, while larger numbers have set aside one or two nights a week as No-TV nights.

“One anxiety is the parent who worries that their kids will become social creeps without it,” Winn says. “They won’t be able to discuss the latest shows, they won’t be popular. What makes a kid popular is how funny, nice, fun, kind and generous he is, not what he watches on TV.”

Even in families who don’t own televisions, she says, kids wind up watching TV. “My own kids watched some TV, they just watched it elsewhere. It’s healthy to be a part of your culture, to know what’s going on.”

That she can’t recall the last program she watched on TV is an admission she makes with some embarrassment. A sympathetic counselor to the addicted, Winn does not project the “holier-than-thou” attitude of some televisionless families.

“I too fight the passive pull,” she says. “I think it’s deeply involved in the addiction with television--the feeling of not wanting to exist for a while, the desire to escape.”