@gwayupdates I swear I get so emotional every time they play a song they haven’t played live before. Feels like they’re “fully” back if that makes sense? It’s hard to explain but I know someone in the fandom knows how I feel
The only reason it took so long for this is because everyone kept treating it as the "you-cannot-have-kids-disease", instead of acknowledging that the condition was wrecking havoc in the entire body, and infertility was just a symptom
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%.
the only reason ppl hate on it is because men can’t handle having a story not centered on their experiences 🙄 women have to watch 20 billion nerd coming of age stories but men can’t handle one cringe 13 year old girl movie…. Okay
France made this wastefulness illegal cause it’s cruel and only causes more waste issues. Any food market or restaurant over 400 square meters has to donate all their good unsold food to charities and are fined if they do anything like this. That law should be applied everywhere