About Me

Mommyhood has forever changed my perspective on life. There is nothing like having a life put in your hands, that you are responsible for, day in and day out (no pressure), to make you see the world in a totally different light. Navigating decisions about so many things becomes a constant. Do you breastfeed, vaccinate, use pampers or cloth diapers? The list of right versus wrong things to do grows and grows because parenting styles become camps that you live in and to leave a camp could mean sudden death! Now, to add to the pressure that you are (not) feeling already, insert technological advances changing and improving(?) at lightening speed. The arguments regarding children and their exposure to technology is growing as quickly as the children themselves; children,mind you, who are now no longer able to even remember when these technologies didn't exist. When my parents were babies most of these technological options did NOT exist. Not even television was "a thing" because most people didn't actually own a television. Fast forward a hundred years later and now television is everywhere, including your hand, if you have the coolest phone. And although television, for most, has been branded as primarily a form of entertainment, educational programming has a long history dating back to the 1930s. Educational children's television does not have as long of a history but, it caught on quickly and has come to be the saving grace for many parents. Knowing that you can sit your kid in front of the boob tube and feel confident that they will come away with something other than pie faced slapstick emblazoned on their very impressionable minds has taken some of the pressure off. Sesame Street, I am pretty sure is how I really learned all of the my alphabet and numbers. Putting educational content in a television show mixed with cool looking puppets and oh my! don't let there be a song or music to go along with it, which is why many of us, up to this day, can sing you the Sesame Street theme without pausing to even think, shows off the best that this medium has to offer. Animal Clinic, showing live animals back in the 1950s, was one of the first to recognize you could get children's attention and teach them something simultaneously. So that's it! I went from the "no television" camp to the "television is not the devil" camp and have lived to write about it here. The options for educational children's television has come a long way and I have learned to truly appreciate a lot it as it assist me in the job I find most important of raising little humans.