Make Satellite TV Educational for the Family

You have probably heard the common logic that "TV will rot your brain". The idea is that spending hours and hours in front of the television, consuming media instead of going out and creating your own ideas will somehow make you lazy, or dull your brain or your intelligence. Americans' fear of the effects of television has caused some parents to cut off the television set all together, vowing not to let their children succumb to the horrors of modern technology and all of its related ills.

But is this truly realistic? Maybe if you raise your child in an isolated environment, and expect them to stay in such a place their entire lives, then yes: you can prevent your children from watching satellite TV. You can swear off upgrading to a high definition television, and only keep a small set around for educational videos and the occasional family movie night. For some families, this setup might work out quite well. But for others, it is just not realistic. After all, the parents might enjoy kicking back and watching a little satellite TV every now and then as well. Should they be forced to give up that pleasure for the sake of their children? Or should they keep an adults-only television set in their room and create their children's first lesson in hypocrisy?

Instead of waging a battle that is this difficult to win, it makes more sense to instead monitor the kinds of programs your children are watching when they spend time in front of the "boob tube". In fact, if you play your cards right, you might even find that you can steer your children to programming that is downright educational. The key to this is having a decent satellite TV package of channels. This way, you will get some educational programming in addition to all of the cable trash. You can set your kids up for a night with the babysitter by turning on "Discovery Kids", an offshoot of the Discovery Channel that is aimed at American youngsters. They can learn about science and history here: certainly this is more illuminating than Hannah Montana and the like.

You can also block certain channels with satellite TV. If there are certain things that you just do not want your children watching, based on the grounds that it is personally offensive or even that you think it is just age-inappropriate, you can simply set up a device to block the channel. Say that the channel in question is something that you might want to watch later on when the kids are asleep: fear not! There is an answer to this one, too. With the ability to block channels, you can actually choose certain times. So, for example, you might want to block HBO from 6 in the morning to 8 at night. This way, your 7-year-old does not unwitting see an explicit violence scene from "The Sopranos" when surfing channels after school, causing you to then have to deal with his or her nightmares for the next month!

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