Balancing Life in a Binge-Watching Culture

It’s Friday night, and all around the US you can find people huddled around their TV streaming hours of their favorite TV shows. This seems innocent enough, it’s not like you’re harming anyone with this behavior. But what if you’re harming yourself, or worse your kids?

Could binge watching TV, as innocent as it seems, lead to other binging behaviors in life? What is this imbalance teaching our kids?

Why Binge-Watching Can Lead to Unhealthy Lifestyle Patterns

When your kids talk about doing anything that starts with the word “binge,” it’s probably not a good idea. Binge watching recorded TV programs, movies, or any other sort of entertainment, regardless of how innocuous it sounds, is setting the stag for unhealthy patterns and attitudes in other areas of their lives. This includes binge eating and binge drinking.

You’ve heard the saying that too much of a good thing can actually be a bad thing. Prayer or Bible study could arguably be the exception, but I’m inclined to believe that faith without works is dead, and there’s a time to get both our noses out of the book and our knees off the carpet, and put some legs to what we’re reading and praying about. Balance, not binge, is what we need to model to our kids.

Photo by: Aaron Escobar, via Wikimedia Commons