"My son Levi, much to my frustration, has never been a big TV kid. For years, I’d put on an episode of Paw Patrol or a newish Disney movie, but nothing seemed to stick. Either he’d come to me halfway through to report he was bored or he’d be entertained enough to finish but would never request a second viewing or talk about it afterward."

I wonder if in 30 years people will say the same about their kids and social media.

"My son Levi, much to my frustration, has never been a big TikTok kid"

Sounds strange, doesn't it. It is also strange how fast we forget. Forget how TV used to be demonized in a similar fashion than social media is today.

"How Kids' TV Got Way Too Normal' by Elissa Strauss"

First line: "My son Levi..."

That is a pseudonym, hopefully.

This is a good read.

A couple years ago I introduced my daughter to Bill Nye’s show. She knew of Bill Nye but didn’t know why he was famous. I always told her “he had a show on TV” but we never bothered to go hunt down an episode until she was 17.

We watched it together.

And oh my god is that the most ADD show of all time. Every 5 seconds was a bang/whiz/fact/cut/weird thing. How on earth did I watch this and actually keep track of it? Was I high on sugar? Was my brain just rapid firing that all of this was perceived as a single episode with masterful writing as would make a soap opera cry? From the outside looking in 30 years later, I’m convinced I was just hyper and a nerd and this show just somehow made sense to me.

> We are all consuming content in this “second screen” era, during which producers of shows are told to keep things basic because people are probably reading their phones while watching TV.

Unfathomable. Yet it seems to be quite common to watch something on television and faff around with that stupid black rectangle at the same time.

I don't get what point this article is trying to make. First the author is 'frustrated' that the kid doesn't like to watch TV (why?), and she dislikes that he doesn't talk about the episode.

But in the end she praises that the weirdness of peewee relieves her of her 'explainer role':

> it was beautifully lesson-proof content, emotionally salient while also, like our minds, a bit ridiculous. As such, it relieved me of my explainer role, permitting me to just lie on the couch.

Then she tries to make a point about "current education practices are bad" based on this observation, her instagram influencers (yes really) and a personal anecdote of a 'feelings chart' in her kids' classroom.

> My Instagram feed is filled with influencers encouraging me to explain everything to my children, addressing even their external and internal realities. “Levi, are you feeling jealous that Augie has a playdate and you don’t?”

> Of course there is value to talking about feelings, and before you start worrying (Feeling No. 14 on the chart!), do know that I talk about feelings all the time with my kids—mine, theirs, and others’. But there is a difference between exploring feelings with our kids and feeling pressured by the broader culture to rationalize, contextualize, and hierarchize each and every one for them

Then she hedges her bets, by saying she's not anti- talking about feelings, but just anti this teaching method that she barely knows anything about.

Just to be clear; learning your kids how to recognize their emotions, how to talk about them, that emotions make us do things we otherwise wouldn't, and that emotions come and go is a good thing.

It's not a good thing to tell them “Levi, are you feeling jealous that Augie has a playdate and you don’t?”. This actually learns your kid that that would be 'valid' behavior, and even if they don't feel jealous now, the next time they might. It's better to ask them what they're feeling and have them describe it in their own words. The chart exists because it's likely that kids start out being unable to put into words how they specifically feel, but they can point at the chart to pick the feeling that's closest to how they feel.

I think the author could be better served by listening to her child instead of the 'influencers' she just so happened to be subscribed to. If the child doesn't like watching television, the solution is not to rotate different tv-shows until something works, it's to turn off the television and go for a walk together.

Are there studies of how we lost the creative edge of ambiguity? Media is a wasteland of sanitized takes, adult media is overexplained as if 10 year olds are the target.

I found a lot of the content from my youth (1990s) to be very boring. I think kids today are lucky that they have so much content to choose from at all times. I used to get to watch TechTV, for instance, about once per year when I went to my Grandfather's house and I would watch it until someone made me stop.

This article reeks of overly opinionated parent.

Eh. I think fluff. A lot of nostalgia pieces point to one specific thing and try to imply that everything used to be as good as that one thing.

Wilder’s Wonka was great. But psychedelic weirdness was never the norm. Children’s shows have pretty much always been largely moralized.

The TV of today has a lot more content that is genuinely good and not just a constant ad for sugar and toys.

This line also bothered me

> Many experts believe that one of the causes of the mental health crisis among children stems from their lack of comfort with having dark or complicated feelings. When they do experience this, they often jump to believing that something is wrong with them and may go on to identify with a clinical diagnosis, which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of believing themselves to be sad or scared because life is a hot mess and hard and dark feelings are to be expected, they see themselves as having depression or anxiety and begin to filter all of their experiences through that lens.

I struggle to see the nuance between this and telling kids to suck it up. We are not in the 80s anymore where the general social narrative is rapid growth. Being a kid has a much more dismal perspective than the 80s provided.

I am going to use a term that is hard to measure: authenticity. A lot of TV programming today, not just for kids, but in general, seems to just pander to the audience rather than tell it as it is, with genuine struggle and strife. There are exceptions (The Bear, most notably). But a lot of it just seems like pablum and slop generated to attract eyeballs rather than to tell a story. Kids sense, and dislike, condescension.

SpongeBob, which was cited in the article as profit making merchandise, seems pretty weird and silly. Kids love it too!

> Today the weird stuff tends to get buried

"skibidi toilet" would like a word

skibidi toilet anyone?

then, as they say, gumball, but also adventure time, gravity falls, spongebob, courage the dog, bare bears, teen titans, ..., there's plenty of engaging content if one let's kids explore and watch what their friends are watching instead of only parent-approved safeware.

[dead]

Just play them some Happy Tree Friends. /s