On Demand
When our 7-year-old son was just a baby, my husband and I made a strategic move to cut the cord on our cable TV. It’s funny looking back now, because before kids we had the full cable package with the extra channels and DVR (Digital Video Recording), so it was pretty sweet. After having an infant we realized real quick that casually watching TV was not going to happen and cable was expensive. We opted instead to subscribe to Netflix and Hulu (and later Amazon Prime when it became available). It was a good decision for us. We have never gone back.
The upside of not having cable TV is that we are saving money and in a way saving time. We don’t wait around for our shows to come on and we can watch what we want when we want, we just pull it up. It’s fantastic. The interesting thing about it is that our kids also get to watch the shows we let them watch when we let them watch.
When I was a kid I watched after school shows, weekend morning cartoons, and the Friday night lineup when I got older. My sister and I would park ourselves in front of the TV with our blankets and snacks and just watch show after show and the commercials in between. It was a part of our schedule and we knew when “our shows” would be on and planned accordingly.
The kids these days don’t have this same experience. I like that my husband and I can choose exactly what shows and movies we let our kids watch. But I realize that it also means our kids don’t always watch the same shows as other kids and may feel a bit left out if other kids at school are talking about a show or characters they don’t even know about. TV isn’t “mainstream” like it used to be, there are so many shows and networks, not just the basic channels we had when we were kids. Our generation of parents are very aware of “screen time” so kids don’t seem to spend as many hours in front of the TV as I remembered doing either.
It’s funny to me too that my kids don’t know what commercials are. Their exposure to commercials is very little. In a way I am glad because they aren’t exposed to the constant toy commercials that I remember watching as a kid and always hooking me in to wanting and needing the hottest toys. But I find that my kids are very impatient. At my parents’ place they have cable and they love to let the TV play in the background. Our kids get so bugged by the interruption of their show or movie when a commercial comes on. They ask if we can fast forward or skip through the commercials and we have to explain to them what commercials are and that they are normal. They don’t get it! I can’t imagine if they had to wait a week to watch their favorite shows. I can’t believe I used to!