It seems unimaginable now, but the first television that was solely mine as a child was black and white. The family room had one that was color, I’m not quite that old, but it was pretty small and even if there were remote controls in those days the three channels we had to choose from made that luxury not as necessary as it might be today.
To say that I never in my wildest dreams could have imagined the options available to today’s kids would be a vast understatement but just as much of a surprise would be the notion that one day I would be forcing my daughter to watch television. We live in a golden era of scripted entertainment, a time when there is simply too much to be able to keep up on.
Like my pile of books, the amount of television I currently have queued up to watch would last me several years without having to add to it. Netflix alone puts out more science fiction and fantasy shows than this nerd had access to over his combined first forty years. Disney + has my almost my entire childhood a click away and the Hasbro shows that it doesn’t carry, GI Joe and Transformers, are available on Tubi.
What is my kid doing while I’m watching all this? She’s on You-Tube. If I were to film myself watching cartoons and uploaded it to You-Tube there would be a greater chance of her seeing He-Man harness The Power of Grayskull than if I locked her in her room with nothing but the DVD set I may or may not have.
There is a lot that You-Tube is great for and I don’t mean to disparage an entire platform’s content. If I were to attempt any sort of DIY I’d watch as many instructional videos as I could find first and within the next few months, I’d guess that I’ll be using it to try and find help solving fourth-grade math problems. I’ve tried repeatedly to get her to watch guitar lessons since her in-person teacher was scheduled to come here for the first time right about the same time people stopped meeting in-person.
She’s not interested. Videos of other kids opening toys and playing with them have been replaced with videos of other people playing video games that she occasionally plays but other than tips on how to gain in-game wealth and prestige in Roblox or Minecraft they are completely mindless and without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. The fact that many of these videos have millions of views and everybody else’s kids seem to be doing the same only makes it worse.
Nothing will ever beat reading for imagination stimulation and the sheer joy of getting lost in the magic of storytelling but a really good television show or movie can sometimes come close. Maybe there is just too much of it but I don’t know that kids today will ever look back at the entertainment of their youth with the same nostalgia that those of my generation do.
We were warned repeatedly that watching too much TV was going to rot our brains, even that we’d go blind if we sat too close. I had moved into my own apartment before cable came to my home town but by the early 80s there was also something called MTV that some of the rich kids had access to that was supposedly going to warp our morals.
Maybe it did, that the answer to what’s wrong with society does trace back to those Sears bought RCA boob tubes. I don’t know.
I’m going to keep making her watch though, even if we have to go all the way back to season one of The Simpsons to do it. We still spend as much time as possible not looking at a screen but if one is going to be on, I want it to at least have a plot.
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Previously Published on ThirstyDaddy.com
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