A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

WE'RE WATCHING IT LIVE. LIKE ANIMALS! Our good friend Joanna Weiss of the Boston Globe explores the question of whether it's a good thing that our kids can always watch what they want, when they want:

But imagine what live TV sounds like to a little kid: not quaint so much as absolutely alien. If you were born into an on-demand world, every form of media - not just TV - seems ever-available and malleable. Satellite radio offers a playback option, in case you need to hear The Wiggles's "Big Red Car" two or three more times. Computers represent a wealth of "Sesame Street" games. TV shows can be paused mid-stream if you need to use the bathroom, or Mom is pestering you to feed the fish. The 15-second-rewind button lets you relive that funny thing Curious George just did.

It's a nice world, when you're 3. Yet I sometimes wonder if my daughter is missing something if she isn't forced to wait for precisely what she wants. Is there some deep psychological benefit to waiting another day for "Dragon Tales"?

It's not just the instant satisfaction that's an issue. Our not having that much age-appropriate material on tv between the end of the school day and dinner time meant that our generation was raised with a common culture of reruns from the previous generation -- "The Brady Bunch," "McHale's Navy," "Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C.," and then more recent programs like "Happy Days," "Laverne and Shirley," "What's Happening!!" and "Three's Company". These were programs about and pitched towards older teens or grownups, giving us a wide aspirational window (not that I wanted to join the Marines or work in a brewery), while I think that our kids are being so microtargeted that they're rarely seeing anything about the grownup world. Yes, Lucy's watching "High School Musical" at 4 and now 5, and so she now has this fantasy-view of what adolescence is like, but I feel like she's not going to be as immersed in the general culture as we involuntarily were because there's always going to be something better calibrated to where she is, and I want to figure out if that's a problem. Is it?