In my parents’ day, if they had questions on child rearing, all they had were a few books and the advice of their own parents. And as any parent will tell you, grandparents are never shy about giving their children advice on how to raise their own children.
But something strange and new happened to my grandparents’ generation, something that came along and fundamentally changed the way people interact with each other: television. Now families no longer had to speak to each other, they had the TV to turn their attention to. The generation before had the same experience with radio.
Inevitably, the TV lost some of its luster when parents realized that staring all day at “the idiot box,” as my parents called it, was turning their kids’ brains to mush. My parents’ generation was no different when Ataris, Nintendos, and eventually Xboxes started taking over.