With all the things offered on cable and satellite television today, I remember being completely satisfied with what was offered on our four television channels while I was growing up. We were able to receive ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and if we switched to UHF, we got one other channel, but it was very fuzzy, so it really doesn't count. We enjoyed after-school specials, morning news, Saturday morning cartoons, evening sit-coms, the Wonderful World of Disney, and Friday night movies. Our afternoons during the cold winter months were spent in front of PBS, watching Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Electric Company, and Zoom. Once a year or so, we were treated with the annual showing of the Wizard of Oz. Between cartoons on Saturday morning, I watched Schoolhouse Rock and learned all the things about history, science, math, and grammar, which they somehow never taught us in school. By the time I was in middle school, we even had cartoons before school in the morning.

Today we have exponentially more television than we ever imagined those 30 short years ago. We have all that we had, then, and so much more. We have all the PBS shows, and then some. We have several channels showing the best of the PBS type nature, history, educational, scientific and artistic shows, so many that we can hardly watch them all. The old PBS shows we used to love are all modernized: Mr. Rogers has passed away and Sesame Street has become a platform for the politically correct. Not only do we have many, many sit-coms on every channel, we also have entire channels solely devoted to showing re-runs of all the old sit-coms we and our parents enjoyed as children. Saturday morning cartoons are a concept the children of today simply don't understand. They have every day cartoons, 24-hours a day, on multiple channels. In addition, there are now all the new shows that aren't meant for children, but are watched by children, nonetheless: MTV, VH1 and the other music video channels; reality shows, crime dramas, and America's Most Wanted. We need not wait for after-school specials or Friday night movies, because we have multiple movie channels and a whole shelf of videos and DVDs for those rare moments when our children can find nothing on the television that they want to watch.

I grew up thinking Mr. Rogers was my neighbor, that Marcia Brady was the coolest girl on the planet, and that the Wizard of Oz was real. Now my children have all the old sit-coms, cartoons, and Schoolhouse Rock on DVD. They know things that I never learned. They also complain that we don't have the full cable TV package and only can receive 10 channels. To them, we are living in the Stone Age and need to have the 500 channel satellite package like their friends down the road. They're afraid we'll miss something. Ironically, everything they want to see can be purchased on DVD, but we wouldn't have time to watch it all even if we owned them. Ah, they're so deprived.