growing up without commercials

One thing I think about every now and then is how I’m going to raise my kids (when I eventually get some) about watching TV and entertainment and things. In my opinion, what’s on television these days is completely worthless, save the interesting documentary now and then.

Ironic as it sounds, I actually grew up never watching “live” television, in the sense of original programming for the day. Even at a really young age, I could recognize it was total crap and I just ignored it all. I did watch a lot of movies — seriously, I’ve probably seen a thousand by the age of twelve — and Saturday morning cartoons, but that was about it. Everything else was reruns of older shows or just movies that we had taped.

I remember we got the Disney Channel when it first came out. I was about eight years old, and we got a VCR shortly after so my mom could record all the shows. Believe it or not, but the Disney channel was actually amazing way back in the day. They didn’t have any original programming, so they just aired their entire archive of old movies and shows for probably at least five years or so.

Anyway, the reason I started thinking about all this was because I was reading my sister’s blog, and she had a link to another mom’s blog that posted about her experience raising her kids and monitoring what they watch.

I thought her post was pretty funny because while she normally showed them videos until recently, her kids had never seen any commercials on TV, and so got really confused when they came on. I kind of imagine something similar will happen with me. First of all, I don’t plan on even getting cable TV (I’m considering cutting it now), but you never know.

I can seriously see me saying something like this though, “I’ve amassed a huge library of shows that I’ve already decided are okay for you to watch. It took me 15 years to watch it all while growing up, so good luck, and have fun.” 🙂

If they come out of it not knowing what a commercial is, I’ll just consider them lucky.