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This was interesting to me. I remember Saturday mornings spent with cartoons, myself. Later on in the day I had to go with my mother to my material grandparents’ house, and pretend that I was more of an observant Jew than I was. (We weren’t supposed to watch TV, write, shop, or do any type of work on the Sabbath. We weren’t even supposed to travel, and yet they knew we wouldn’t get to see them, so I guess they closed their eyes to that reality.)
For a couple of blissful hours, though, I got to immerse myself in the cartoon world, with no worries over competing with my peers at school to get top grades, no concerns over being clumsy and never getting chosen when we divided into teams at recess, no anxiety over squabbles in the extended family that I didn’t understand, but that scared me sometimes.
Why I remember Saturday mornings with such fondness, though, is because this was a precious down time, a time I could escape from the pressures of the real world (and yes, kids do have stress and pressures)–a down time that I don’t think kids nowadays have at all.
When I was raising my own kids, there was still a little of this time, Kids were already starting to be over-programmed, in my estimation, and as a young mom, I railed against this. I refused to book up every moment of my kids’ lives with an activity. I refused to be their perpetual chauffeur. I insisted that they have time to do nothing. Sometimes that did mean watching cartoons, or some other mindless show, and unwinding. My eldest needed that brief down time after school, to let his tensions ebb. He was never a compulsive TV watcher in spite of this need, and after a half-hour or so, he would turn off the telly on his own, have a snack and get busy with other things. He was always an excellent student. The others were a bit more addicted but we had rules about how much TV was permitted. True, they had chores to do, usually on Saturday mornings, that took a lot more time than what my mother required of me (She was a cleanophile and I had to do only a bit of dusting because cleaning wasn’t a skill of mine, according to her, and still isn’t, according to me!) Once they did their chores, though, there was time for a little TV, for outdoor play, for reading, writing or lounging about.
When I was a kid, I cherished my time to be left alone, to immerse myself in the sillyness of cartoons, but also to read, write and play in an imaginative way. As I got older, I had homework to do, from both regular school and Hebrew School, but every moment of my life wasn’t programmed to the hilt. My mother wasn’t my social director. I found things to do with my friends, like roller skating in the streets, stoopball, jumprope, etc. I didn’t sit in front of the TV all the time, probably because I was allowed to do it some of the time. It wasn’t a forbidden pleasure.
That brings us to kids nowadays. As an adoption agency director for about 30 yrs, I got to observe a lot of other families, aside from my own and the families of my four kids’ friends. Then I got to observe my grandchildren’s lives.
With most households being two parent working ones nowadays, because it’s hard to survive economically otherwise, parents don’t get to see their kids all that much. Here in the US, many children start daycare at six or eight weeks of age. One would think that families would want to maximize the time they get to spend together. Contrary to that, most families I know have one activity or another scheduled on most days of the week. After work and daycare, and often after quick stops for fast food or prepared take-out, there are sports activities, “enrichment” classes for the kids, lessons of one sort or another. On Saturdays and sometimes Sundays too, there are baseball, football, softball, soccer games, ballet or acrobatic lessons, etc. etc. I don’t know a lot of young kids who have chores at all, or who get to stay home on Saturday mornings and lounge in their pajamas in front of the TV, who read books, or who just play with their parents and/or siblings.
The author of the above blog post probably wasn’t thinking all of this while writing about cartoons, but the post did trigger a lot of memories and feelings for me anyway. Cartoons were and probably still are, often silly, too violent, sometimes sexist (though I hope not as much as in earlier decades) but they still hold a fond place in my memory because they represented a more innocent, easier, less cluttered and programmed time.
