When I was a kid my favourite show was Mr Rogers. I get the sense that Bluey is the closest we have to that level of energy in a kids show these days. I don’t have children yet but I look after my niece after school and we watch Bluey now and again. Even Bluey completely absorbs her. I can wave my hands in front of her face and she doesn’t notice. I’d like to think that that wasn’t the case with me and Mr Rogers but who knows…
This morning my daughter walked into the living room and started telling me about something that happened to her. She stopped talking mid-sentence when her eye fell on the television that I had forgotten to turn off.
Only after calling her name three times and considerably raising my voice I got her attention again.
The show that was on was... the cooking channel! So the bar for television completely absorbing a child's attention seems quite low :-)
I've seen grown adults behave this way with their phones. Totally zonked out and unaware of anything happening in the real world. Don't think it's an age thing.
I have a weird quirk that when talking to someone, if they start using their phone, I stop talking until they're done. It has made me painfully aware how true your comment is. Many times people don't even notice that I stopped talking (and why event try to talk to someone that isn't listening?)
I don't know how society managed to normalize playing with your phone during a face to face conversation. Like, imagine going back to 1990 and getting into a conversation with your friend over coffee, and in the middle of him talking, you whip out a newspaper and start reading it. He would instantly say "WTF are you doing, man?" But today, the same thing happens with the phone, and it's just kind of...accepted?
when I was growing up my father tried to get the attention of my sister watching saturday morning cartoons. After the third attempt, he just threw away the TV, and so I grew up most of my childhood with no TV
Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood [0] is directly based on the character by the same name from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.'
Daniel Tiger is one of the very, very few TV shows we let our daughter watch, and it teaches emotional regulation so incredibly well and has plenty of tunes that I've caught her singing to herself, such as "it's okay to feel sad sometimes, little by little, you'll feel better again"
I'm in Australia and never grew up watching Mr Rogers, but after seeing the "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" movie I recognised the tunes and then spent an inordinate amount of time looking into the origins.
I had a similar revelation after watching a few episodes with my daughter! Wait a minute, that intro song sounds familiar... and the names of the characters sound kind of familiar...
I have heard many stories of being a Sesame Street zombie once upon a time, so I doubt you were much more resistant to Mr Rogers gentle charms =).
There's a definitely a big gulf between the Mr Rogers / Daniel Tiger / Bluey energy and almost every other show. It's crazy now noticeable it is. Even modern Sesame Street is much more frenetic and lively than old episodes from the 80s and 90s. Which is not to say it's empty junk food like Cocomelon, it's just that those shows have raised the required addictiveness bar overall.
No screens is the best way, because any screen is just too absorbing for a kid. The tough thing is you have to do it for yourself, too, or they will very quickly figure out the hypocrisy.
FYI, the Mr Rogers website [0] cycles shows from the back catalog (5 shows at a time, on a bi-weekly cycle). It's a regular in my kid's rotation (with Bluey and Sesame Street).
Glad you drew this comparison. I have a 4yo who (TLDR) we didn't really push TV on and started reading on his own when he was two.
Before he was born I put a lot of thought into what he would watch before he was born assuming it would be a huge necessity to address. I torrented Mr Rodgers and Reading Rainbow and Eureka (amazing old science cartoon if anyone's encountered it) and I even started writing a script that would randomly select from these and automatically turn off after 1-3 episodes.
Basically I am shocked at how wrong I was. He had no natural interest in TV beyond a few minutes, even if we were watching something. We didn't have a reason to push it, when he did see newer kids media like Bluey / Cocomelon etc he would zombie out exactly as you described and then have noticeably crappier behavior for a while after we would have to have a minor battle to turn it off. Felt like microwaving his brain and we had no reason to push it on him so we didn't. After a few days he would never miss it. We let him watch stuff at friend's houses and still pop on old stuff that I downloaded once every week or two. Same basic behavior / problems. We always back off for the same reasons.
I grew up on TV and I don't judge parents who legitimately love watching TV with their kids or need it as a babysitter because of demanding schedules or absent child care assistance. It is an incredible tool in a culture that often separates extended families and discourages grandparents from playing active daily supportive roles.
But yeah for whatever reason our kid started reading independently when he was two, got really interested in languages, got his basic operators down while he was 2-3 and has never had any serious behavioral or developmental problems and other parents are always asking us what we did to accelerate his development and make him such a genius.
We didn't do anything unnatural, we just didn't intentionally push him to watch a lot of TV. He still watches stuff, we still watch stuff. It's just on a laptop and ends when he starts turning into a zombie.
With that said Bluey seems fine to me, my kids the one with the weird zombie reaction. And disclaimers all kids are different, I'm incredibly lucky to work from home on a schedule where I get to hang out with him all the time and I'm pretty sure regardless of zombie Cocomelon watching his generations problems are not going to be rooted in them zonking out on TV but who knows.
My just turned 4yo - similar I guess. Zero screen time until he was 2. Knew his abcs by 1.5, but reading on his own around 3 and a bit. Now He gets 1 episode of something in the morning. 1 ep in the evening and that's it. Maybe a movie on the weekends. He can entertain himself well. Love books. Today I took him to the doctor, we had to wait and he just chilled and looked at a book. I've never given him my phone to watch something.
I don't know if it's him or genetics or the strictenss around screentime, but he is a pretty easy kid to deal with these days.
TV isn't all bad. Octonauts is cool. He knows so many sea creatures from that show. Creature Cases is another good one.
I never liked tv as a kid either. But youtube actually would destroy my life. Be careful with YouTube once they start seeking things. I also didn't really like to read but i just built things from the lego bin or my magnets. My family would watch a movie and I'd just go upstairs and dump out some bin of some things and start messing around. I did watch things from social pressure eventually and like i said, youtube will kill me someday, but it also has taught me so much. Anyways, fellow no-tv kid here
I've seen that zombie behavior too when my kids watch too long. I think there's definitely value in some shows, and some of them are actually very educational. I think there's a lot more variety these days than when I was a kid.
As a rule we don't allow Blippy because the man creeps me out, and something about his childish behavior rubs me the wrong way. OTOH the other day my 5yo kid asked me if I knew why the sky was blue. I genuinely wasn't sure and he somewhat explained what he learned on TV from a show about sunlight and particles in the air.
100% agree on Blippy, the vibe is very off for me. Especially once I learned about his history as a shock youtuber[0], I'm glad that he says he's grown past that and regrets making the content he made but his content is tainted (pun intended) forever for me and I'm not interested in exposing my kid(s) to that.
I grew up in front of a TV, I don't want that for my kid. Sometimes we can't avoid it and we're not avoiding it altogether with our kid, but I can definitely notice the negative effects.
If it's not too personal, I'm curious to know how a child that young acquires an interest in languages. Do they have a friend from a different background or something like that?
