Solo4114
Master Member
Trust me, my kid uses her imagination all the time. Watching Bluey or If You Give A Mouse A Cookie on Amazon doesn't diminish that (although it does get annoying when she wants us to reenact Bluey episodes with her sometimes). But having a D+ subscription is definitely not reducing her imagination at all.Better to let them use their imaginations. I watched a lot of TV growing up, but we didn't get cable until I was about 12. Even then I still spent a lot of time outdoors, riding my bike, reading, building props, and doing other things besides sitting in front of the television. Then again the internet didn't exist then. I can't say I would have been the same and reacted to things the same way kids do now, so what do I know. lol
Yeah, every stick for me was a blaster or lightsabre.Oh yes. I think we grew up in the same era.
A good straight branch with a decently angled stub: that was perfect to pretend I was handling a blaster.
I'd spend my day wandering the forest (aka the lot next door with about 20 trees), either looking for "a secret base" or "fleeing the Empire" because "I had something they wanted."
So, it's been really interesting for me watching my kid grow up in this era. First, she VASTLY prefers using a tablet or ipad over watching on a TV. She can control it way easier than she can control the TV with a remote, and the larger screen doesn't interest her as much as being able to skip around and have full control over what she watches (I mean, based on what's available to her).You're right though, we don't know. Today everything is different. But I'd like to think that, for kids, anything away from a screen - physically playing somewhere - is better than anything else.
She also jumps all over the place with the things she watches, and she pretty much just completely focuses in on it while she's watching. She'll also skip thru episodes to get to the parts she likes, etc., etc.
For a while, I was kind of despairing of how she didn't have the experience of just, you know, sitting and passively watching a show, or multiple shows, on the TV the way I did as a kid (although, in truth, I was usually also playing with my Star Wars and G.I. Joe guys on the couch at the same time). But, like, that "Saturday morning cartoons" thing is kind of alien to her. She doesn't just have something on the TV.
One of the things I've noticed, though, is that while she does this stuff, she has turned out to be pretty good at self-regulating. She only really wants about 2-ish hours of that stuff. Sometimes less. She just hits a point where she's done and wants to do something else. Go for a walk, play pretend, go to the playground near us, etc., etc. It's interesting how she just kinda gets saturated at a certain point and is just...done, and it's made me wonder if part of that isn't simply because when she has everything available to her at a touch, she really only wants a bit, and then she doesn't want anymore, whereas for me growing up, I only watched TV on the weekends, and therefore consumed ALL OF IT THAT I COULD even if it wasn't stuff I really wanted to watch or liked that much. Like, I'd watch The Funtastic World of Hanna Barbera on Sunday mornings (after I finished watching Star Wars on VHS, of course), not because I really loved The Paw Paw Bears or Galtar and the Golden Lance, but just because it was TV and I could watch it. There were shows I loved, of course, but plenty I didn't care about and still would have on in the background. That experience is totally foreign to her and not anything she's interested in.
I mean, that image was basically my childhood. One of my favorite memories is when we had a (in my memory) MASSIVE blizzard here in Philly back in '82, and to dig out our sidewalk, my dad basically shoveled a snow trench which came up to (on me at the time) about shoulder height. For that week, my front stoop was Hoth and Imperial walkers were approaching Echo base.There's this artist named Craig Davison who made wonderful artwork about OT Star Wars from a kid's perspective. I always thought these illustrations reflected the mindset nicely