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FAMILIES : Life After TV : Here are a few painless ways to get your children away from the tube. New Year’s Day is a perfect time to begin.

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Children’s singer Bill Harley has a tune--”Dad Threw the TV Out the Window”--about a frustrated father faced with yet another sunny Saturday and two slack-jawed sons glued to the tube.

As the song goes, the boys thought all forms of life as they knew it had ended when the television died. But it didn’t. After the shock subsided, they all told a few jokes. (“Mom did her impression of a duck that couldn’t fly.”) And the tube’s passing was never mourned.

Are you ready to throw the TV out the window? You probably aren’t alone. The average 6- to 11-year-old watches television more than 22 hours a week, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co. Younger and older kids watch it even more.

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And consider this bit of cheer from the American Academy of Pediatrics: By the time today’s child is 70, he or she will have spent seven years staring into the box.

All of this cries out for a New Year’s Eve resolution, and today’s the day.

It can be done, and you don’t have to throw out the TV. Consider the family of Richard and Cheryl Baldwin and their two sons, Ryan, 12, and Scott, 11. The boys went two years without watching commercial television, and they’re talking about going for a third.

It all started when the Ventura family was on a trip to San Diego. The boys saw a billboard and started singing a commercial jingle they’d seen on television.

“I told them they were falling right into the hands of the Madison Avenue people,” recalled Richard Baldwin. “I said, ‘They’ve got you hooked.’ ”

By the end of the trip, the boys had taken the challenge. They would show they weren’t hooked. They would watch no commercial television for a year. (News and educational programs on commercial-free TV were OK.)

At first the boys found it difficult if they went to a friend’s house and the TV was on. They would come home all glum. But after a few months their friends began to understand and wouldn’t have the set on when the Baldwins were there.

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For the boys it wasn’t a hard deal to keep. They played outside a lot anyway with skateboards and bikes. And they hadn’t been watching TV that much to begin with--maybe two shows a day.

“I think they were more interactive with other kids than they would have been otherwise,” Richard Baldwin said. “The amount of reading also went up. I don’t think they would have read that much either.”

At the end of a year, the boys were rewarded with new mountain bikes. The challenge was issued again, and after a second year they became the recipients of a used little sailboat. The Baldwins are a sailing family and the boys have always sailed.

Scott and Ryan said it wasn’t hard to keep their end of the deal. But it wasn’t so easy for some of their buddies.

“Some of my friends tried it, and they blew it the second day,” Ryan said.

The Baldwins plan to do it another year, in spite of some reservations Cheryl Baldwin has about the escalating cost of the incentives. “It’s getting expensive,” she said.

On the other hand, she thinks the boys have learned to control the impulse to gorge on television. “I wanted them to learn how to self-regulate,” she said. And it seems to be working--even though the second year ended some time ago and the decision to do it a third year wasn’t made until last week, the boys still were not watching much TV, except for some family viewing on Friday nights.

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“We felt strongly that it was a resounding success,” she said.

Neither she nor her husband, the county’s air pollution control officer, were involved in the television challenge. He describes himself as a “TV illiterate,” watching only a few programs on non-commercial TV. She watches it a bit more, but would wait until the boys were in bed.

“It changed the dynamics of the family,” she said. By not watching TV commercials, she wasn’t bombarded with as many requests for toys and sugary breakfast cereal.

That’s a plus not to be taken lightly. Consumer Reports claims the average child sees about 30,000 commercials a year.

It’s the commercialism that goaded Jody Fickes, a former librarian, owner of Adventures for Kids bookstore in Ventura, and the mother of two boys.

“They’re pawns for advertising,” she said. She came up with a different way to limit television viewing when her boys were in elementary school.

Her boys had to earn their TV time by “banking” an equal number of reading minutes.

“We kept a chart on the refrigerator,” she said. “They were on the honor system.” They recorded 15-minute increments, and to watch the tube they had to have a plus-balance in their account.

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The system made them actually shop for the programs they wanted to watch. “They became very selective about it,” she said.

Fickes said that children’s viewing habits tend to reflect those of the parents.

“If the parents think TV is a priority, it’s hard for the kids not to,” she said. For that reason the television in her home was never in the living room or a place where the family tends to gather. And, the boys were not allowed to watch it on school days.

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