Kids Programming Today & In Your Day

How do you think the programs your kids watch today on tv stand up against what you watched back in your day?  I think about it in passing all the time but today I over heard the words “nether regions” and “num nums” used on a cartoon and I thought, “huh. Not sure how I feel about that.”  To be fair, that was the show “6Teen” which is geared toward teenagers, but still.  Anyway, for fun, I compared TV then to TV now.

The cartoon experience

Remember when Saturday mornings were the highlight of your life?  SCOOBY DOO, LAFF OLYMPICS, & SUPER FRIENDS were my favorites. Then Sundsay night was the Disney feature.  OMG that was so exciting.  Sadly, my kids today have no reason to be excited on Saturday mornings or Sunday evenings because they have all the same shows available to them 24/7.  There is no sense of something special or exclusive.

Same goes for after school.  I couldn’t wait to get home for SPEED RACER & LOONEY TUNES after school each day.  But today I am not aware that there is anything on that they can’t catch some other time.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing that they are NOT glued to the tv after school, it’s just a bummer that they don’t know that excitement we had at cartoon time when it was a more limited commodity.

programming quality

As much as I loved SCOOBY & LOONEY TUNES, though, and feel that scheduling was more exciting in my day, some of the programming is really good.  I really like I-CARLY, ZACK & CODY, and HANNAH MONTANA and can only imagine how I would have looked forward to shows like that in my day.

I would say it is the cartoon programming that gets under my skin. Is it just me or are the voices and sounds really high pitched and irritating?  I despise just hearing POKEMON in the background.  Then we have these visually ugly and depressing shows like CHOWDER, FLAPJACK & COURAGE THE DOG.  Why in the world would someone make these shows?  They are so unpleasant.  Do we really need these images influencing our kids?

Other than Pokemon my kids watch a lot of Boomerang which makes me happy because they are passing on these gloomy shows and instead watching things like THE PINK PANTHER.  That makes me sort of happy.  We really do limit our tv time but it’s hard, especially in the summer, when I work from home and need to create a few blocks of quiet time so I can stay focused.  TV and Wii are the only babysitter/daycare we can afford right now.  Now that I think about it, it’s probably the increased viewing hours this summer that have me so aware of kids programming right now.

What do you think?  Do you ever find yourself shocked by something you see or hear on your kids “kid shows”?