At what age did your parents get a television?

[MKxcomm]

(06-22-2011 08:18 PM)Sharon Wrote:  We had TV but no cable...

Us too! It's still funny that my grandma knows more about working the cable remote than I do!

[grace2live]

We always had TV. For us, getting a VCR was the big deal. Dad wanted it, but mom objected because she thought it might make us watch *more* television. Darned right it would. That was the whole point, IMHO. Dad eventually got it, I think because he wanted to watch more sports. I found it frustrating sometimes because dad could watch sports on TV, with all the beer commercials, but mom wouldn't let me watch "A-Team" because sometimes there was a swear word on it. Of course we COULD watch Magnum P.I. because . . . um . . . boy, Tom Selleck sure was good lookin', wasn't he?

My dad travelled a lot for his job, and he decided getting a CB radio would be a good thing so he could get help if he were ever stranded somewhere. (Some of his driving was in fairly isolated areas.) Mom didn't want him to get one because sometimes people would swear on it. Seriously.

[Faith]

Never had a TV. My parents didn't get one until I was 20. I am still totally clueless about pop culture, I guess it doesn't help that I love to read and I turned my cable off a few months ago because I hadn't turned on the TV in 3 months.

[pastor's wife]

Only had cable for one year about three years ago. I LOVED TLC - I could have watched that all day, especially the ones about real estate or cleaning up clutter. It was so fun seeing badly designed or messy rooms be transformed into appealling spaces. And I loved watching the birth stories - seeing a baby born often makes me cry. It's so amazing.

I also liked watching the ridiculous movies on the SciFi channel: you know, stuff like giant snakes inhabiting old factories and people unsuccessfully trying to kill it.

Now I just got Netflix, and if my little one weren't always watching Yo Gabba Gabba and Strawberry Shortcake on it, I'd probably be on it a whole lot more!

[JordanMaria]

We always had a TV in our house. When I was in my early teens we got the religious satellite Sky Angel. The channels were either run by religious groups or family safe channels. The Seven Day Aventist channel was my favorite because they had a cooking show and I would like horrifying myself with all their tofu creations like tofu seasoned and shaped into a turkey or tofu eggs over easy.

After a few years of that we got Dish. That's when I discovered Spongebob. WOOT!!! I love spongebob. Now my family has Fios.

[HazelEyed]

My family was pretty fundy, but they got a TV when I was small (probably when I was a baby ... I remember them talking about not having one when they were first married, but I think that was just because of $$) and I grew up watching stuff like Mr. Rogers, Reading Rainbow, Scooby Doo, Wishbone, reruns of the original Star Trek series, etc. I also spent plenty of time outdoors and I read obsessively as a child, so much so that my mom would ground me from books rather than TV, so I think I had a good balance of TV and other activities. Close friends of our family didn't have a TV, and even though we were fundies too, we thought that was WEIRD. I remember not being able to quite fathom it ... to me it was like not having a refrigerator.

[HazelEyed]

Now I watch a lot of shows (but about half of them I just watch online, since several of them air in the same timeslot), and we have Netflix. But I almost never sit down and channel surf. I hate doing that.