Children and ADHD TV

If there is one thing I can say about television, it has certainly made its mark on every generation. For me, I feel that I grew up in the golden age of children's television. Reruns of the classic 80's nickelodeon shows such as "You Can't Do That On Television" as well as all of the tv shows of the 90's including (my favorite) Rocko's Modern Life, All That, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Saturday morning cartoons with reruns of the classic Looney Tunes, and not to mention the television shows not necessarily meant for television that my brother and I watched anyway (SNL, In Living Color...) One of our favorites was watching Wild Discovery. We were fascinated with watching the animals survive in the wild, and it became a favorite of ours. When I was babysitting my little cousins this summer, I was forced to watch the children's shows they have now, and I confess that I found myself lost. I didn't understand and couldn't follow most of the cartoons that were on, and I honestly couldn't tell you what they were about. All I know is that I saw a lot of things flashing by and faced paced action. It can be kind of a trippy experience to watch children's shows now... I don't think I have to point out how creepy the Teletubbies are to watch as an adult. The teen shows weren't much different, and I don't think I can describe into words how upsetting it was to have to watch the Jonas brothers for an entire afternoon. I did notice that my cousins wanted nothing to do with the History Channel or Animal Planet, which distressed me. Why does it seem that kids are even less likely to watch something educational? Perhaps my brother and I were the rare exception, but I feel like most children's television shows are pretty much required to be very colorful, extremely fast and follow the guidelines of having to catch the child's attention with something new every 60 seconds. I hope that future children's shows take the initiative to actually make the children learn something (remember learning geography with "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago?"?) otherwise the next generation will be an over-stimulated mess with no desire to learn from television and will only look to it for meaningless enjoyment. And having such a powerful medium being only used for entertainment when it has the potential to teach the world would be a complete waste and a great shame.