everyone is always like “you had to be there” for any era but i feel like for jb believe era you really just had to be there i’m genuinely sorry if u weren’t
Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.
The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.
What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.
Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.
In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.
It's hilarious that there's a whole fanbase that wants this boy to be some tortured art and literature intellectual but he's really just a NYC wigga dude bro who loves bad bitches and coke.
🚨 BREAKING NEWS: Tens of thousands of Spencer Pratt voters are now receiving rejection letters from the county clerk saying that their ballots were not counted due to signature irregularities. Yet, Governor Gavin Newsom just passed legislation that would make it illegal for anyone conducting oversight, to contest signatures that they deemed fraudulent. Democrats allow ballots to be signed with an X, a -, or a 🙂 to pass and count, but all of a sudden, only Republican signatures are being flagged for irregularities, rejected, and not counted. 🤔 One of these California Republican voters said that his signature has been on file for over 20 years and there has never been an issue until he voted for Spencer Pratt. Nithya Ramen has beaten Spencer Pratt by less than 3000 votes. There are at least 18,000 Pratt voters who received this letter saying their votes were rejected.
My mom paid off her house in 2003.
Thought that was it. Thought she was done. Thought it was finally hers.
Property taxes were $1,800 a year back then.
She’s retired now. Fixed income. Same house. Same neighborhood.
Property taxes are $24,000 a year.
That’s $2,000 a month.
On a house she already paid for.
She’s 71 years old and the government sends her a bill every year just to stay in her own home.
You never really own anything in America.
You just make payments to a different landlord.
The enthusiastic gloating over a the loss of a candidate whose entire campaign was simply to clean up his hometown is one the most disgusting displays of arrogance and ugliness I’ve ever seen in my life.
This is nothing short of political bullying. It’s abhorrent and it is increasingly why the ideal of American politics being of the people and for the people is being supplanted by professional grifters and communist activists.
Absolutely disgusted.
I’m at that weird age where every younger person I meet makes me realize how much l've aged, and every older person I meet makes me realize I'm still a baby.