Parenting & Family Quote by Dave Rowntree

Rowntree is mourning a lost kind of cultural misbehavior: the children’s TV that didn’t treat kids like fragile liabilities and parents like the real customer. “Anarchy” here isn’t chaos for its own sake; it’s permission for young viewers to see authority punctured, rules bent, and taste contested. The best kids programming used to smuggle in that feeling of a secret club - jokes that flew past adults, characters who talked back, stories that admitted the world is weird and occasionally unfair. That’s not just entertainment; it’s an early lesson in skepticism.

The line about parents objecting “if they got to object” is the tell. It points to an older broadcast ecosystem where gatekeeping was looser by default: fewer channels, fewer parental dashboards, less organized outrage. Kids could encounter something slightly improper simply because it was on. Today’s “very safe” isn’t only about content being bland; it’s about risk being engineered out by committee. When every show is a brand asset, every joke a potential complaint thread, “safe” becomes a strategy, not a value.

Coming from a musician who emerged from a scene that prized irony and DIY abrasion, the complaint doubles as self-portrait. It’s an argument that cultural literacy starts early: if you never get the playful shock of the unexpected, you grow into an audience trained to prefer comfort over curiosity. The subtext is sharp: protecting kids can become a way of protecting adults from discomfort, and that’s how a culture dulls itself.