Has the quality of children's entertainment plummeted, or do I just have nostalgia goggles?

[GeneralMacArthur]

A lot of my friends are having children these days, and I'm starting to think about that world myself.  It's led me to pay much closer attention to what kids are up to.  And it seems to me that the quality of children's media and entertainment has just absolutely plummeted.  It seems like everything is dominated by a few huge brands and then a bunch of littered junk with little in-between, and that the few huge brands produce a lot of samey, low-effort, lowest-common-denominator garbage.

When I was a kid, here was my experience:

TV/Movies:  There were a wide variety of high-quality, well-made, creative television programs designed to appeal to kids while also activating their brains and teaching them stuff.  The Magic School Bus, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Wishbone, and so on were much better than the stuff kids are watching these days.  All of these were made by professional educators who had a lot of passion for what they were doing.  Stuff these days seems churned-out and dull.  Especially for younger kids, like ages 3-6, the Arthur type fare has been replaced with dozens of Cocomelon clones and looped YouTube sing-song videos.  The one exception, I have heard, is Bluey.  My boss says Bluey is the only kids TV show he lets his kids watch, and otherwise they're reusing stuff from the 80s/90s.

Games:  My childhood was the golden age of edutainment computer games.  Zoombinis, Math Blaster, Reader Rabbit, JumpStart!, MECC, Broderbund Software, Oregon Trail, and so on -- every millennial remembers this stuff.  Looking back it's impressive the extent to which these games presented a fun, engaging and challenging experience for kids where you progressed by learning and utilizing valuable educational lessons.  And there was also the common shared language that came from us all playing these games in the computer lab at school.  When I look at the equivalent now it's mostly cheap apps on a phone/tablet that have none of the depth, challenge or creativity.  Again, it feels like these are no longer passion projects for professional educators and geeky guys, but rather edu-washed junk food being churned out as fast as possible.

Books:  I think I wrote a little about this in another thread but when I go to my local library or Barnes and Noble and look in the children's section, it remains dominated by media that came out in the 20th Century.  All the recent stuff is fanfiction based on video games and TV shows.  The only new thing that seems to have caught on is Diary of a Wimpy Kid, if that can still be called "new."  I see that Dav Pilkey of Captain Underpants fame, who ruled the Scholastic Book Fair when I was in elementary school, remains a popular author.  Again it just seems like there's nothing new of any quality coming out.

Cartoons:  Now when I was a kid we of course had the grand tradition of having sleepovers Friday night and then waking up Saturday morning at 6 AM to watch the Saturday morning cartoons.  4 hours of munching on junk food while watching absolute mind-numbing trash loaded down with commercials, right?  But the thing is, those shows were a common language, a source of imagination and creativity for us, a set of serial adventures we would talk about at school.  That was an important part of social and creative development.  There doesn't seem to be any equivalent among kids these days.  The explosion of low-quality junk means there's just not that shared experience anymore, not that shared language.  They all know Minecraft.  That's about it as best I can tell.  Pretty much everyone knew what was going on with Pokemon or Dragonball Z or X-Men when I was a kid.  I think this has just broadly been replaced by social media.  Which again is just a massive amount of low-quality content.

In conclusion, when I was a kid we had a modest amount of children's entertainment offerings that formed a shared experience and language that improved our social skills and served as inspiration for creative games and imagination.  Most of them were relatively high-quality and had some amount of passion or ingenuity behind them.  That's been mostly replaced today by a proliferation of low-quality, churned-out offerings of such sheer quantity that there's no shared experience anymore.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I should also add:

The funny pages -- in my town you got the newspaper every day and there was a full page of about 20 comic strips that kids would read and know about.  You would have your favorites that you would clip out and tape up inside your locker, or slide in the see-through plastic section in front of your binder.  Some of them were adventures that you would follow.  Again this was a common experience that a lot of kids had and it formed a shared language.  With the death of newspapers, this simply no longer exists and there is no replacement for it.

Playing video games at each other's houses -- you used to have to go over to your friend's house to play video games together.  And the game was a physical piece of media that you brought over and shared.  You would have 2, 3, 4 kids get together to play games and connect over this shared experience.  This seems to have been entirely supplanted by online play, but also parents don't let their kids start playing games online until they're like 13.  Whereas we were playing Mario Kart 64 at, like, 7.  I know for a lot of boys especially, this was the best part of their childhood, probably some of their most treasured memories, because the game served as an excuse to have a long bonding experience with your buddies.  And that's an experience kids just don't really have anymore.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Damn kids and their iPads. Back in our day we didn’t have iPads—we had Etch-a-Sketches! Kids these days don’t even know what an Etch-a-Sketch is! What the hell is this world coming to?!

I unironically think that the average amount of brain development per minute on an Etch-a-Sketch is higher than the equivalent metric on an iPad.  If you take a random twenty-minute chunk of time a kid spends on an iPad and compare it to a standard twenty-minute Etch-a-Sketch sesh, the Etch-a-Sketch is probably resulting in more brain growth.

Of course, the Etch-a-Sketch gets boring after a while, whereas the iPad offers an enormous amount of content.  But that's exactly my point, it's not like we only had Etch-a-Sketch, we had loads of different toys to play with, media to enjoy, things to do.  A lot of those have disappeared with screens taking over everything and flooding the space with oodles and oodles of cheap and easy crap.