Parenting & Family Quote by Ruth Buzzi

Buzzi’s line lands with the plainspoken urgency of someone who made her career inside the very machine she’s warning you about. Coming from a TV comedian whose face was once a weekly fixture in American living rooms, it’s less a scold than a confession: television isn’t background noise; it’s a co-parent with a loud voice and great lighting.

The phrasing does a quiet two-step. “It’s so very important” sounds like the old parental plea, but then she pivots to empathy: “I feel for every parent.” That’s not moral panic; it’s recognition that the job is already hard, and media makes it harder in ways that aren’t evenly distributed. The subtext is about power and fatigue. Parents are asked to curate childhood in a marketplace engineered to override curation. “Control...to a certain point” isn’t defeatism; it’s realism about how screens seep in through babysitters, older siblings, friends’ houses, and now the broader ecosystem of clips, ads, and cultural catchphrases kids trade like currency.

Context matters: Buzzi came up in an era when broadcast television was a common national campfire, with limited channels but enormous influence. Her concern anticipates today’s algorithmic flood, yet it’s rooted in an older anxiety: if TV can shape taste, humor, gender roles, and acceptable cruelty, then “watching” is never just watching. She’s arguing for parental attentiveness while admitting its limits, a rare combination in culture-war conversations that usually prefer blame over practical solidarity.