This is a guest post from Lee Ann, who got tired of being “frazzled mom” for Halloween every year. This week, she is Professor McGonagall, and she has the hat to prove it!

I’ve spent my married life deflecting televisions.

When we got married 18 years ago, my husband was starting his last year of college and writing an Honors thesis in physics. I was starting a one-year master’s program that included several internships and a master’s thesis. Between the two of us, we also held down five jobs.

We hadn’t thought about a television set, but someone found out we “needed” one and offered us one of their spares. We talked it over and decided we needed a TV like we needed holes in our heads. We used his Pell grant to buy a computer, sold a car to buy a hard drive, and proceeded to live the craziest year of our lives.

When we came up for air after graduation, we discussed TV and decided we hadn’t missed it, though we thought we might need one once children came along. So we turned down the offer of someone’s spare TV for our new apartment.

When we bought a house a few years later, neighbors learned we didn’t have a TV (though our new home sported an enormous antenna), and we received several offers of spare TVs. By this time, we’d noticed that my husband has more than a titch of compulsiveness in his personality. On visits to my mom’s house, he could stay up until 3 a.m. watching re-runs of CSPAN. I’m equally capable of staying up way too late, obsessing on “my” shows, and ignoring people for TV programs. We began to realize that, for our family, TV was not the healthiest choice, and we quietly turned down the next round of free TVs.

Our three brilliant but not neurologically typical children only added three additional layers of obsessive intensity to the household. So we kept our home TV-free. We’ve lived in the same neighborhood long enough that the neighbors have stopped offering us their spare TVs, and the big antenna blew down in a storm. Now we only deflect televisions when new people move in and hear about us.

We keep quiet about our choice, because it’s difficult to explain without lengthy discussions of the family neurology. Or else, if we leave that part out, we come across sounding self-righteous or judgmental. I acknowledge the value of the good stuff we’re missing. But I don’t miss TV in my home.

In those early days, it was hard to tell whether the absence of TV was affecting our family. The first year, we managed to both stay married and finish our respective theses, which was a good sign. We subscribed to the newspaper, partially so we could read the TV reviews, allowing us to nod intelligently when conversations at work turned to TV.

Nowadays, it’s easy and kind of fun to get rid of the door-to-door cable salesmen. “Sorry, I don’t have a TV” is not an excuse they hear every day—although I did deflect an offer of a TV from one fast-thinking cable guy. Big satellite dishes, little satellite dishes, cable, TiVo, and now HDTV have all passed us by. On the rare occasions when I try to turn on someone else’s TV, I usually can’t even figure out which remote to use! Luckily, most TVs still have “off” buttons on the front, and I’m pretty good at that one.

Since we still read the TV reviews, we can usually follow conversations about TV. For a long time, the only exception was discussions about commercials. No one reviews those in the newspaper, so I’d have to confess, “Sorry, haven’t seen that one. I don’t have a TV.” Now people follow reality shows, as well, and I have to confess to not having a favorite American Idol contestant. Then half the time, I have to deflect another TV.

The kids, in their turn, have grown up without Barney, Teletubbies, Sesame Street, Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles, or Bart Simpson. An unintended effect was that they grew up without Disney. I suggested the other day that they might want to go to Disneyland, and all three kids looked at me like I was crazy. YouTube has been helpful, since I can share Sesame Street songs or Electric Company sketches with the kids (anyone else remember The Electric Company?), if I feel like their education needs rounding out (“Silent E Song,” anyone?).

We sometimes gather around to watch a DVD on the computer. But we really have to want to watch it, because the screen’s not that big, and the computer’s not that comfortable to sit around. The kids don’t see screen-watching as a recreational activity. My daughter has come home crying from the neighbors’, because she thought her friend wanted to play, but the friend only wanted to watch TV!

We don’t have a family prohibition about watching TV. We rent or borrow a TV for General Conference, and for the Olympics. At Grandma’s house, we had a great time watching a double-header of “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” (We weren’t.) The kids are allowed to watch at their friends’ houses; they’re easily enough disturbed that content hasn’t been a problem. And my husband watches cop shows on business trips.

Again, our choice is specific to our family. Other families seem to handle the background noise, and all the stuff you run into that you wish you hadn’t, and the being tied down to your shows. Our family would have to expend mental energy we don’t have to spare for those things. We’ve been praised for our “willpower,” but it requires no willpower to avoid watching “Desperate Housewives,” since to watch it, we would first need to drive to an electronics store and spend $700. And that’s the whole point—for us.

We’ve missed some good stuff. I’m sad every year to miss the Rose Parade. And people are still talking about the opening ceremony of the 2002 Olympics, which we missed because we hadn’t managed to rent a TV yet.

But we’ve missed a whole poopload of bad stuff—beer commercials, perfume commercials, dramatized murders, sex scenes, and the evening news come to mind. My children (now 9, 11, and 13) saw the Twin Towers fall a couple of times—but not hundreds. Until this year, they believed that the f-word was “fart,” and the s-word was “shut up.” And they are happy with one box of sugared cereal a year each, on their birthdays.

So what do we do? Read and talk, mostly. Everyone learned their letters and numbers without Sesame Street or Blue’s Clues, and every night I pick up drifts of newspapers, magazines, and books from the living room floor. The children’s favorite pastime is having Conversations. (An activity requires capitalization if it takes an hour or more, averages 90 decibels, ranges over three rooms, and destroys furniture.) They also spend a lot of their free time pretending. For Halloween, my daughter was the Spider Princess, and her brother was the captain of the Beetle Guard. They had to keep explaining who they were supposed to be.

When I sense a whiff of self-righteousness from the kids, I try to douse it by pointing out the time they spend playing computer games. We have screens in our lives—just no TVs. Is there a difference? I’m not sure—but I’m not getting a TV.

I wonder if my relationship with TV is cause or effect of not having one. For instance, I have a hard time working with background noise. I can spend six hours at home alone in silence—no TV, of course, and no music, either. Have I just not acquired a taste for background noise, or is the family neurology actively working against it? Also, everyone in the family avoids violence, scary images, and horrific evening news. Cause or effect? Both, maybe.

The TV-free life isn’t for everyone. I don’t pretend it should be. But if you’ve ever toyed with the idea of living without a TV, know that at least one other family has done it, oddly but successfully. And we started out odd. Now would be a great time to start. I read in the paper about how HDTV will make all the old TVs obsolete when the broadcasting standards change. Instead of upgrading, why not just toss the tube in the trash?

But, if you try living TV-free, get ready to deflect a lot of free TVs!