Speaking of being counter-cultural ^[1] and killing your TV ^[2], a reader writes in to tell the beautiful results of living such a life:

We killed our tv 30 yrs ago when our youngest was 3 yrs old. We spent our evenings reading 1) lives of the saints 2) good secular literature such as the Chronicles of Narnia 3 and memorizing the Baltimore Catechism. We had a prayerful, peaceful, joyful home with NO rebellion whatever when the kids reached their teens. They NEVER asked why they had to go to Mass.  At ages 32 and 30 they are fervent Catholics and my daughter is a contemplative nun.

Aside from that, killing the tv was the best financial decision we made.  The kids’ attention span was not being constantly being fractured,and the people who tested them for the school district (two years apart) both remarked on their extraordinary attention span.  They both did very well in school.  My daughter was an A student for the 16 yrs of her schooling and they both got a lot of scholarship help on a merit basis.  In fact, my daughter was a National Merit Scholar. None of the above would have happened with a TV. Our home was very conducive to study without it. It paid off.

It drives me to distraction to hear parents worry about “the culture” as they are walking out the door to drive over to Best Buy to buy a still bigger entertainment center to import the dreaded culture into their own home and into the hearts and minds of their children.

It also drives me to distraction to hear all the talk about the “vocations crisis.”  There is no vocations crisis.  There is a parenting crisis.  There is a leadership crisis.  When priests and bishops kill their own tvs, and can persuade even as little as 5% of their young parents to do the same, within 15 to 20 yrs they would have more priests and religious than they would know what to do with- especially if they pointed them in the direction of the lives of the saints, the Baltimore Catechism and family evenings together.