Is Disney+ Turning My Kids Into Entitled Monsters?
Parents who enjoy showering rely heavily on streaming services — but at what cost to their children’s brains?
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I have twin four-year-old daughters who, when they’re not actively trying to kill each other over a sticker, can usually agree on one thing: They want to watch television. Or rather, in their modern parlance, they want to watch “a show,” since “television” has long since ceased to mean a medium of entertainment. In our house, the television is simply a screen connected to a magic box that delivers their shows at several clicks of a button, all while they yell at me to hurry up. My kids don’t want to watch something as vague and open-ended as “television.” They want to watch My Little Pony, Paw Patrol, or lately, Dragons: Rescue Riders. And they want to watch it right now.
But they don’t just want to watch a specific show. They want to watch a certain episode, which they will proceed to describe to me with their adorably convoluted four-year-old’s sense of character and plot. Rarely do these abstracts match up with the synopses on Netflix. I’ll click with increasing desperation through nine seasons and 200 episodes of My Little Pony, searching for “the one where Spike sneezes” or “the one where Rarity makes a pretty dress” while pressing them for more details: “Is Spike sick? Doesn’t Rarity make a lot of dresses?” Finally, I give up and just choose an episode at random, upsetting them because I can’t conjure the precise 22 minutes of cartoon pony frolicking that they have in their fevered little minds.
I won’t pretend I didn’t watch a lot of television growing up, or that I wasn’t also obsessive about it. But if you will excuse the wheezy ramblings of a 41-year-old man, in my day “television” was all we had — an unpredictable stream of randomness that might yield cartoon treasure or dull disappointment, depending on the time of day and the whims of the channels. Pee-Wee’s Playhouse in the mornings, followed by another viewing of Back To The Future on HBO, then a few fallow hours of game shows and syndicated ’70s sitcoms I’d flip between until prime time arrived. Like all idiot dads, I have tried explaining to my kids how difficult and unfair things used to be for me, as though this would cow them into…
