Then and Now…What Happened to the Good Stuff?

Looking at what’s on T.V. today for our kids, I know I can’t be the only one who hears the garbage truck sirens and imagines a giant trash can.

It’s just so hard to find quality shows for our kids to watch in this age.

Growing up, we had shows like Reading Rainbow, Wishbone, Arthur, Zoom, Cyber Chase (I feel like I could go on forever) who taught you about literature, language, math, history, and helped tune your moral compass…and that was public television. Even cable channels and channels with paid advertisements such as Fox and Nickelodeon gave us shows like Hey Arnold, Dora the Explorer, and Blues Clues in which children can engage on a language journey that was fun and engaging.

As a speech therapist, I see more and more students that are coming to me with a sever lack of communication skills. Their parents want them to receive speech therapy services to improve deficits that should have been addressed in early intervention speech therapy. And as crazy as it sounds, some of the fundamentals these kids are lacking could have been addressed during playtime and T.V time. T.V. sometimes gets a bad rep and rightly so nowadays but it only makes me wonder if I would see such an influx in severe cases of language delay if kids were watching more educational programs but also if more of them were available.

Just my two cents.

- Lauren Bryant