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.

[Rand]

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?!

[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.

[LAKISYLVANIA]

It's nostalgia goggles, pretty sure adults said the same thing when we were young. Everyones childhood was just better. "When we were young, we at least play outside" was the argument. Today no-one really can.

Every era has its good things. Pokemon wasn't high quality too, it was basically always, team rocket tries to steal a pokemon and ash rescues, and pikachu gives them a lightning bolt. It's even that repetitive that aside of season 1 it's basically unwatcheable.

I haven't grown up with any thing you mention (exc pokemon), incl. even minecraft because i was too old for that. And everything else seems to be typically american thing and not really popular here. Though i got into minecraft as a young adult, it's obviously fun and probably a game i would've played a lot if i were young today (tho i'd suck if i were kid, most young kids suck in survival mode, cause its kinda hard lol).

Cartoons were at their best prior to our age. The golden age of cartoons really existed because feature length animation or animated tv series in the way we have them today weren't feasible yet for budget reasons. So obviously that was better back in the day, but even better prior to your day. The best that comes close today is adult animated humor shows such as south park, rick and morty, the simpsons and a million other series, though they exist for quite a while as well usually and quite a lot were already there when i was young.

For comics, i didn't grow up with american comics but franco-belgium has quite an influential comic culture too, it's just not about "superheroes" really here. I guess popularity here is declining but also since the original drawers/creators are slowly dying off. So in that regard it's perhaps true esp. in an era people are moving more & more to multimedia.

I know roblox is kinda popular today, which is indeed low quality imo (but it's free and accessible, so therefore popular). I guess something similar in my day we had was habbo hotel and i also never knew what to do there or what the point was.

I have played edutainment games as well, and yes, they were fun. There are a ton of good games today as well. I don't think games quality has really decreased, though it shifted focus a bit. And is today a bit too commercial-oriented.

Maybe for younger kids (3-6) you have a point... But it's really hard to judge, because i'm not really following what people create for that demographic today.

For older demographics (12+) i'm inclined to disagree, and say it's about the same. And ... kids of our own age still have access to old content. They still watch spongebob and so on. Those aren't really disappearing.

Something i'll miss though from my childhood is runescape though lol. I don't think there's anything like that today.

I've noticed anime has gotten popular with younger demographics as well (demographics younger than mine). I never really knew about "anime" until an adult really. That's how not really popular in Belgium it was, but younger demographics have kinda catched up with that. And maybe it's not better than it used to be in my time, because a lot of great animes date back from my age, but it just didn't get the popularity it has today.

__

I think watching a lot of what you liked back than back would make you realize that a lot of what you watched doesn't age well when you grow up. Don't forget about that. As a kid you tolerate a lot more and so on. And you just have a different taste, it's hard to explain.

[LAKISYLVANIA]

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?!

Yea

Games and stuff on phones are low quality generally. I'll say though that it was already low quality in my time, both before the era of smartphones and the first smartphones. It has probably even gotten better, but generally mobile games (or fb games) etc... suck. I prefer handheld and console games and pc games a lot more than that (more in depth etc, no microtransactions) etc...

In that regard it isn't great but it has never been great. "mobile games" was never great. Maybe it replacing more & more different kind of games is a bad thing but mobile games as a thing itself was never great.

Idk what an etch-a-sketch is. (edit: oh lol, yea that sucked as well).

But tbh no kid between 7 and 12 really plays like with an etch-a-sketch. You're comparing a toy for toddlers, with something that usually people aged 10+ and sometimes 12+ only get.

I mean... it's a stupid argument, it's deranged to even compare an etch-a-sketch with an iPad. That's just because you're prejudiced to younger generations from the beginning.

[Rand]

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 mean... it's a stupid argument, it's deranged to even compare an etch-a-sketch with an iPad. That's just because you're prejudiced to younger generations from the beginning.

Stupid. Deranged. Prejudiced. Never has a trifecta of insults against me been so accurate. Bravo.

[dead0man]

it seemed like most of the cartoons I watched as a kid in the 70s/early 80s where made during WWII, the books we had were even older, video games designed to educate children consisted of the tragically bad Basic Math on the Atari 2600 and it was one of the worst times for children's movies.  At least we could distract ourselves with cigarettes starting at age 10, but they are far too expensive for kids these days.  (and, ya know, all the Karens out there that would piss themselves if they saw someone under 35 smoking something that wasn't weed)

[Lambsbread]

Yes, the things you enjoyed as a kid are going to resonate with you much more than the things kids enjoy now when you are no longer a kid.

[Meclazine for Israel]

You are never going to beat Looney Tunes.

Daffy Duck
Road Runner
Pep le Pew

Those cartoons were made with love.

[TheTide]

The difference between now and even twenty years ago is that it's more difficult for anything to stand out in cultural terms, because there's so much choice. This isn't inherently a bad thing, but it does mean that (as far as this genre goes) there isn't really anything that has the cultural impact of, say, a Sesame Street.

[Blow by blow, the passion dies]

You're right. The quality of virtually everything in entertainment has declined with the internet.

[wnwnwn]

Compare Backyardigans with Skibidi Toilet.
Even if Backyardigans is about ghetto children on drugs, that's better than looking at animated toilets.
Despite that, there is potential in the camera and TV people, I suppose.
Also, Austin is an Atlas user. Pablo too, but only to troll Austin  and other users.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

I agree with Arlo Guthrie on Children's entertainment:

[SWE]

Compare Backyardigans with Skibidi Toilet.

You can't compare an online animation made by a random self-taught hobbyist with an actual TV show with a team of professionals and a budget which aired on an actual children's network, what are you talking about

[Agonized-Statism]

Hard disagree. IMO, the '90s and '00s were a dark age by and large: most of the cartoons I remember had really depressing settings and plots with tortured protagonists (Timmy Turner being shown that the world was better off if he didn't exist in the It's A Wonderful Life parody was a real gem), ugly experimental art styles, gross-out humor in every other scene, and a ton of sketchy showrunners especially on Nickelodeon's side. I guess the censors were too busy making sure Spider-Man wasn't allowed to throw a punch. Kids were locked inside by helicopter parents, but then they were completely okay with foisting them into a postmodern hellscape that presented a pretty bleak picture of life. It's not surprising that a lot of Millennials and Gen Z abandoned western entertainment for anime, and I have to imagine that the nostalgia for that era is some kind of Stockholm Syndrome. I wish I had shows like The Owl House and Amphibia when I was growing up.

[Mr. Smith]

You are never going to beat Looney Tunes.

Daffy Duck
Road Runner
Pep le Pew

Those cartoons were made with love.

There's a cat named Tom and a mouse named Jerry that disagree.

[wnwnwn]

Outside my ironic first post, TV Shows for children are mostly created to gets views and sell toys.
The only show that I remember where I suppose children learned something was 'Word's World', and that was surely for only an small part of its audience.

Children should better watch animal docs and maybe some films like 'A Nightmare Before Christmas' or 'Fantasia' once a month. Also, maybe some Topo Gigio shorts, so they go early to bed.
If you are over 16, you should prefer watching the rest of the TSPDT list.

Well, 31 Minutos is good, but I wouldn't let a child under 12 watch that.




Nah, watch whatever you want.

But it's true that most of who think that is from nostalgia. I remember seeing Jakers at a young age and it seemed cool back then, but now it doesn't. Regular Show was just random things happening. AT was OK and envolved well at some point, but nowadays the fandom seems too edgy. Old Tom and Jerry was fine, but too violwnt for young children I suppose.
Well, all of them give us good memes. I put a message about Backyardigans as memes on them became popular in Peru by 2020.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

You're telling me this isn't quality entertainment?

[Crumpets]

Kids' TV shows declined during the 2000s, but from what I can tell, have had a good resurgence in quality in the streaming era. Kids' movies I do think are worse now than they have been in the past, but there are still some gems out there. I'm not familiar enough with the other stuff to say with any kind of confidence.

[It’s so Joever]

I’ve heard Bluey has some strong elements and current kids games such as Roblox are honestly better than the stuff I played back when I was younger.

That being said nothing will compare to the cartoons of *my* childhood, (Adventure Time, TDI, Regular Show etc) in my own head and it’s probably like that for you as well.