My two boys, together.
We finally caved and started our month free trial for Netflix (an online site for movies and TV shows through a monthly membership fee) and found out that in the 'kids' section the Rugrats is there. Roman of course is in love with it. When we put Netflix up he'll immediately say, "want Tommy! Want Tommy!" - referring to the one and only Tommy Pickles we all knew from Saturday morning TV in the 90s, when me and Bryan were the children ;). Now our child is the child and it's a little strange to be sharing things from my own childhood with him.
We (me and Bryan) went TV free for over 2 years and I won't lie we did watch stuff online but we just didn't want a constant stream of TV in our home, nor did we want the fights over TV that a lot of households seem to have. By only watching it online for those 2 years, we were selecting and selective about what we watched. There's been recent talk to go TV free again and just have Netflix in our lives and I admit to being open to this idea. But to be honest we hardly have our TV turned on unless we're hooking it up to my laptop or watching recorded shows. In my home we had one day completely free of TV from my early childhood and it made such a difference to the family - I felt closer to my family because we weren't fighting about what to watch and we had to do other things, mostly together.
Roman doesn't see a lot of children's TV; he watched one kids programme when my mum was here but this weekend he's seen rather a lot of it. I don't feel 'bad' for that at all, I don't feel guilt and I don't feel like I'm raising a TV dependent boy. If the TV isn't on, he won't ask for it to go on and when it is on he's not phased. But...the Rugrats? He loves that a lot. I don't really 'agree' with a lot of the things going on in that show (Angelica the spoiled brat, babies being bottle fed, stupid parenting techniques being used etc) but then the Simpsons could be viewed in the same light, I suppose. The point is that I feel parents read a lot into TV shows when it's not the TV show that's the problem; it's the parenting style or the crappy explanation you hand to your child when they ask questions. Plus me and Bryan enjoy these shows so we're comfortable sharing them with Roman. To say to him "look, this is what we used to watch when we were children ourselves!" and yes he looks at us like we're crazy but that's because we are crazy ;).
