The value of old school...

Sometimes I love showing my kids stuff that I enjoyed when I was little. In part, sometimes this is because the content just seems more appropriate than what's on tv for them today.

I'll take 'Hoppity Goes To Town' Over 'Waybalou' any day.

Then there's the whole Charlotte Mason crew, who'll tell you that books and show designed for children today are dumbed down to much and don't excite our children's interest. I was amazed to see how fascinated Cosmo was with the 'How My Body Works' 80's series vs something like 'Nina and the Neurones'.

Not that there's anything wrong with Nina, but he get's bored and leaves the room, whereas he asks me to keep rewinding bits of 'How My Body Works' because he wants to see the blood clotting again...etc...

But the most valuable thing I've noticed for my son is the fact that old school cartoons are in 2D, and the graphics aren't very good.

Does that sound like a bad thing?

When my son was first diagnosed with ASD, the paediatrician told me that he had trouble separating truth and fiction. That he thought everything he read was true, and everything he saw on tv was really happening.

This was certainly true with the pixar movies he loved. We watched 'Cars' over and over again and he would shout at lightning McQueen 'you have to change your tyres or they'll go bang' and I'd say 'sweetheart, he can't hear you, it's just a movie'.

The tyres would go bang and he say 'aw man! Not again!'

No amount of explaining could convince him that the TV wasn't Skype. That these things weren't actually happening somewhere in the world.

Until we watched 'Muppet Babies'.

I wanted to show him an episode I'd watched when I was a kid about good things happening in the dark (we were going through a stage of wanting the lights on all night). I'm not sure quite when it happened, but he seemed to understand that it wasn't real. I introduced some more nostalgic cartoons, like 'wacky races' and the next thing I know he is telling me that 'despicable me' (another Pixar favourite) isn't really real. It's just pretend.

This is such a relief. Even bedtime stories, we were having to be so careful with the content, and explain over and over that it hadn't really happened. Now we are free to explore a world of fiction, without traumatising him everytime there is a negative storyline.

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