Lisa and Michael would come home from work, tired, and often cranky. They’d turn on the TV while making and eating dinner. Their children, Allyson and Grason, would eat in front of the TV and after, withdraw to their rooms with their own TV’s. How the hell can they develop intimacy when their TV watching prevents them from carrying on a conversation with each other? Husbands and wives have forgotten how to talk to each other because there is a TV that seduces their attention. Americans watch over 35 hours of TV per week. But do fathers talk to their children that much? Do husbands and wives talk to each other that much? Usually not!

If used correctly, TV can be a binding force, and a force to develop skills and intimacy. TV has some wonderful programming that can be both entertaining and informative. However, first, there should only be one TV set and it should be situated in a common room. “Only one TV, you say! What happens when we want to watch different programs?” Obviously, family members will have conflicts. It is critical for the development of intimacy to learn how to handle and resolve conflicts. Thus, multiple TV’s prevent opportunities for the skills of conflict resolution to develop. I see marriages end because people could not resolve more important conflicts than TV programming because they never learned skills of compromising.

Max, our younger son, felt that he was getting the short end of the stick in terms of programming, so he suggested we divide up the days we have control of the remote. We all named our highest priority—mine was the NY Giants—and we scheduled those in, and then we watched TV together. We shared experiences of the programs and often talked about them. Different families may make different solutions, but the skill of resolving conflicts can be honed while resolving TV scheduling.

TV is absolutely forbidden at our dinner table. Dinner is a vital time for families to communicate with each other. Here, over a nice meal, family members can relate experiences and problems. Joe and Helen, clients with marital problems, rebelled when I told them to throw out the TV in their kitchen. After I explained why, they relented. At first, they didn’t know what to do since they had not communicated while the TV dominated. There were awkward silences. Slowly, they began talking to each other. In about a month, they started learning about each other all over again. Soon enough they were among the patients who felt that TV had interfered with intimacy.

TV’s can intrude in the bedroom and destroy sexual intimacy too. Try making love while Jay Leno is doing his monologue. Worse, very few things can reduce passion as much as the grim realities presented during the late-night news. Lack of TV is probably the reason that the birth rate soared after the great Northeast power blackout, and why India’s birth rate declined by one half after villages were electrified. TV is so effortless that it becomes the activity of least resistance, even at the cost of intimacy.