I remember when I was still a kid and they came out with the TV ratings (Y7, G, PG, etc). My mom kept saying how great it was because blah blah it will keep kids from seeing bad stuff. I was like, “Mom, are you kidding? Right now everything on tv is limited to somewhere around PGish at the worst. Once they get these ratings in they’ll be able to put much worse stuff on tv and justify it by saying that it’s got a rating on it, so if you don’t want to watch then don’t.” My mom totally didn’t think that it would happen like that.
Fast forward and now I’ve got my own very young kids. We don’t watch anything except limited cartoons and limited movies with the kids around. There’s just nothing that I can let them watch. We have a couple of cable shows each year that we watch after the kids go to sleep, and those don’t run at the same time. Often we just don’t watch anything. My parents watched only very tame stuff when I was young, but I still remember a lot of inappropriate content that I don’t want my kids seeing.
There ARE a lot of great educational cartoons out there now, that didn’t exist before. It’s just too bad there’s nothing that all of us could watch together.
I actually thought some of the stuff out when my kids were little (late 1970s and the 1980s) was bad enough that I didn’t let them watch it. I watched most of the things I let them see with them (yes, even Sesame Street and Capt Kangaroo and Mr Rogers, we sat and watched and sang the songs and talked about the things they saw and then I threw them outside to play or we went to the park or walked in the mall if the weather was bad, or made a craft or something).
Oh, and I remember not letting them watch Dukes of Hazzard. I hated that show because it got them all revved up and I didn’t see how it had any redeeming qualities for little boys. They thought I was mean, but boys needed to be doing something other than watching TV anyway. They joke about it now. And of course all of the shows I thought were bad seem so mild in comparison to what’s on today.
You haven't learned to love "Super Why!"? The spelling princess is my favorite; I was state high school spelling champion of Virginia in 1984 ;-).
Have you tried the David Attenborough nature documentaries, such as "Planet Earth" and "Blue Planet." (There are many others, many available streaming on Netflix.) Our little boys (3, 6, 8, 10) love them, and recite nature facts endlessly, and David's soporific yet nerdy voice makes the baby fall asleep, too!