PULLING THE PLUG ON KIDS TV TIME

It was only 3 p.m. after school, but 9-year-old Ian Scott had already surrendered to the glowing black box atop the living-room cabinet--the 21-inch family television set.

Slumped deep into the couch, armed with a bag of potato chips, his school homework shoved to one side, Ian went on his daily TV-viewing spree.

He stared at show after show, leaving the couch only when his mother, home from work, fixed dinner. Then he was back at the set until his 8 p.m. bedtime.

That’s the way it was two years ago for Ian Scott of Irvine--4 1/2 hours of the tube every weekday. Even more on weekends. Week after week, month after month.

A TV addict.

“I couldn’t stand it anymore,” remembered Ian’s mother, Susan, herself only a casual TV watcher. “He was glued to the thing, hypnotized by it. He never did anything else--just sat there, like a little zombie.”

She took action. First she told him: Absolutely no TV after school. Of course, that didn’t work because she wasn’t home to enforce it. “I’d come in and he would be sitting there like a little angel and the set would be off--but still warm!”

So she took the knobs off the set. That didn’t stop Ian, who used pliers to turn the dials. She even hauled the set off to work with her. But Ian simply went to a friend’s home to catch up with his “Dennis the Menace,” “Tom & Jerry” and “CHiPs.”

In September, 1988, Susan Scott carried out the ultimate threat: She pulled the plug. She threw their TV set out. She sold the little monster.

Free at last.

The spellbinding tyranny of television in America’s homes has been profusely documented, analyzed and debated since the electronic device became the prime source of entertainment and information in the ‘50s.

And the trashing of most--if not all--television programming has been a favorite pastime for just as long, the target of national citizens’ coalitions as well as TV columnists and media researchers.

You know the attacks: Too much violence. Crass commercialism. Twisted reality. A never-never land. The boob tube .

The PTA and other organizations called for the industry to clean up its act and for parents to seize control at home by monitoring what their children saw and cutting back viewing hours.

By the ‘80s, the outcry went beyond even this coexistence with the electronic enemy. For some the focus was on the couch potato syndrome--TV as passive, addictive behavior--or what Marie Winn in two popular books labeled the “plug-in drug.”

This led to much talk of living without television in the home, from engaging in temporary “TV turnoff” experiments to ridding homes permanently of TV sets. There was even a new kind of advocacy, a small group calling itself SET, the Society to Eradicate Television.

But while national surveys showed that the viewing masses agreed overwhelmingly with critics--that quality programs were indeed few and far between--most families remained apathetic about taking any sweeping action in their own homes.

According to a recent Los Angeles Times Poll, 40% of the parents surveyed imposed some limits on when and how TV was viewed and 9% limited the amount their children watched. But another 49% said they didn’t impose any firm viewing rules.

“Heightened awareness is one thing, but the problem is that most parents still aren’t capable of taking matters into their own hands,” said Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children’s Television, one of the best-known national organizations for promoting greater “quality programming” for children.

Too many parents, Charren and other veteran observers argued, are still willing to use television as a surrogate baby-sitter, a kind of electronic pacifier.

If anything, television’s hold on the masses is as mesmerizing as ever.

“All you have to do is look at the latest (industry) statistics,” said telecommunications professor George Mastroianni of Cal State Fullerton. “The norm today is for more--not less--TV viewing. And you can bet this is as true in Orange County as anywhere else.”

The latest national Nielsen Media Research figures:

--The number of households with at least one TV set has been at or close to the 98% mark for the past decade. The figure is even a bit higher in Orange County, 98.4% of 824,200 households.

--The hours spent watching television (or having the set turned on) have been mounting dramatically for years, from a daily per-household average of 5.1 hours in 1960 to 7.2 hours today.

And officials with Orange County’s PTA network believe that even if they were able to count the limited-TV or no-TV families here, the numbers would be very few. (Locally, the Society for the Eradication of Television lists only three member households, none with children.)

Is it any wonder that TV-set resistance in Orange County, as in the rest of the United States, is still regarded as somewhat odd and a tiny, silent minority.

So what is it like to live outside the TV-watching norm--and here in Orange County?

Ask Pete Major, 42, a landscape architect, and his wife, Connie, 40, a ceramic designer, who keep their three children from watching more than an hour each day at their Santa Ana house.

Ask Susan Scott, 38, a single parent (she is divorced) and a buyer with a computer firm, whose Irvine apartment--and son--are still without a television.

It isn’t easy.

Life without TV was rough for Ian Scott. “I guess I was bored and felt kind of mopey,” recalled the now-11-year-old with terse understatement.

His mother, however, elaborated: “The first few weeks, he just wandered around the apartment in shock, like he had lost his best friend. He kept asking me, ‘When are we going to get another TV?’

“I felt so sorry for him, really. But I knew I was doing the right thing. But it was a scary move to make because like everyone else I had lived all my life with a TV always there!”

Ian wasn’t left completely TV-less. For a while after school, he would go to a friend’s home and get his fill of the afternoon action and cartoon reruns.

But slowly, his mother recalled, Ian began to drift away from any TV and find other things to do, like more skateboarding around the neighborhood or staying home erecting miniature buildings with his once-ignored construction set.

One thing led to another. “We started to do more activities together--playing cards and checkers, going to a movie, biking or running together,” his mother said. “He’s become a little wiz at making the salads for dinner. And some nights we do our homework the same time (Susan is a part-time business major at Coastline Community College).”

Best of all, she said, “Ian’s grades have really gone up, and at home we talk, I mean really talk. You don’t do that with the TV around and blaring away. Then, you don’t communicate at all.”

There are drawbacks, she admitted. “OK, some programs I do miss,” she said, “such as newscasts, ’60 Minutes’ and the really fine public television shows.” But the minuses far outnumbered these pluses. “The trivial programs, the awfully violent depictions, are even worse today.”

“Yes, I believe that kids do imitate (the violence) they see on television,” she said. “Now Ian’s not so restless; his energy isn’t so bottled up.”

Ian’s own assessment remains somewhat ambiguous. “Yeah, I still miss TV at home.” But he added, with a kind of grin: “I guess it’s OK without it. I guess it isn’t too bad.”

Picture Ian Scott now at home. Most likely, he’s sprawled across the bed in his room, surrounded by his favorite National Geographics and his books on aircraft and outer space. The radio is on softly, tuned to a light-pop station.

He is once again mesmerized, but this time by an older, pre-TV medium. He is reading.

Pete and Connie Major are willing to allow television in their home--but on their own terms.

They have imposed no-nonsense limits on their sons Sage, 11, and Kale, 7, and daughter Poppy, 9. This usually means no more than one hour of TV each weekday at home, and not much more on weekends. The children cannot watch any program without their parents’ OK.

And most of the programs the children do see are either widely lauded educational shows on public television or family-oriented, nonviolent sitcoms.

If the Major children watch news programs, such as those on the Northern California earthquake catastrophes, their parents are there to answer questions or discuss some of the more graphic scenes and potentially sensitive implications.

This is exactly the kind of parental strategy advocated for TV families by such organizations as the PTA and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“The idea is not to put a total lid on TV, but recognizing that there are some wonderful programs and that parents can put these to work for them,” explained Connie Major, a former president of the Santa Ana PTA Council.

She said she and her husband--both activists in grass-roots efforts to revitalize central Santa Ana neighborhoods--are themselves only casual TV viewers. His one concession: an occasional viewing of “Monday Night Football.”

“We started (imposing the TV limits) when our oldest, Sage, was still in preschool,” Connie said. “We wanted to catch our kids before TV had a chance to take over their lives.”

But strict viewing limits are only half the battle. “You have to offer your children real alternatives,” Pete added, “so that they don’t want to--or don’t have the time to--sit down in front of that darn tube.”

Accordingly, the Majors’ single-story house is overflowing with competing attractions: a closet filled with board games and drawing materials. Shelves covered with children’s books and magazines. A computer and a piano on which to tinker and learn.

If that isn’t enough, the Major children’s after-school and weekend hours are crammed with everything from soccer and gymnastics to scout meetings and hiking treks.

“It isn’t just that the children (in limited-TV homes) have far greater avenues to imaginative, direct involvement,” said Pete, who is also board president of the private Orange County Community Housing Corp., a program for low-income housing.

“You’re also raising children with greater exposure to cultural diversity, to the world as it is--not the terribly narrow, warped, insensitive depictions you get on most television.”

Added Connie: “Parents can’t let up on maintaining the (limited-TV) standards. You can’t because television is just like candy to kids. Given the chance, they will, of course, always go for the junk stuff.”

No one has to tell these TV-dissident families that they are part of a still underwhelming minority in a TV-obsessed America.

A couple like the Majors get less flak, because, after all, they still have a set. But the very few without a TV draw stronger reactions.

Consider again, Susan Scott.

If others hear about her no-TV status, the reactions, she said, are always that of astonishment. Some in admiration: “Gee, I wish we could do that too, but we don’t have the gumption.” Others with a touch of righteous pity: “You mean, you just can’t afford one?”

Indeed, Susan’s own relatives back East still don’t know. She hasn’t had the nerve yet to tell them. If she did, they, too, would be appalled.

“I have an uncle who’s in the TV repair business and who has a set in nearly every room in his house,” she said. “To him, not having a TV is being un-American. Or like not having a Bible in the house!”