Now that I’ve let the shameful cat out of the bag that my kids love the tube (not the London Underground, although they’ll probably go for that too), I can now blog more freely about this overly-demonised activity (or inactivity rather).
When I was young, my Mother never stopped my sister and I from watching television. There were no house rules as to which programs we could see (obviously porn and the disturbingly violent were not in the picture, but we didnt want to see them anyway), and there were no “tv” time limits or specifics to regulate it at all.
In fact, when I was around two and Sesame Street first came out, my Mom proudly told me that I’d watch it every day, at eleven o’clock sharp, while I ate my brown rice and fried chicken with a Japanese sesame topping she made from scratch (we were into the micobiotic diet thing and she practiced trancendental meditation if you get my drift).
Years later, my sister and I would get home after grade school and head straight for the television, where we’d watch cartoons from Superfriends to Smurfs while having our after-school snack. Not that we were couch potatoes by a mile. In fact, while the television was a device open to us to our hearts content, we nearly always preferred to play with each other – whether it was our elaborate imaginary games under the big dining room table, in the sunken living room (it was the late seventies!!), or in our room, where we would lay out all our play houses and entertain ourselves for hours with a game we called “village”.
[tags]Seventies television, childhood, television, Sesame Street[/tags]
Originally posted on November 24, 2006 @ 9:44 pm
