"Pure Entertainment"

There was once a mom who could say nothing good about cartoons except that pure entertainment should count for something. I had an opinion.

"Pure entertainment"? I don't think I believe in that.

If someone is being entertained, that person is thinking. That person is analyzing SOMETHING, and every trail made in the brain is a reuseable trail, and a trail to connect to other things.

If someone is NOT being entertained, they will be learning negative, yucky stuff—being made unhappy, learning what and who to avoid in the future.


Whatever your children do should be unfolding in as stressfree and joyful a way as possible. THEN it will be mindful.

If the opposite of mindless is mindful, it's not the stimulus but the thinking to consider.

SandraDodd.com/t/cartoons
(In the past few days I've been in three different homes with kids watching cartoons, in Bangalore and Pune, India. I've seen parts of Disney's beautiful "Snow White and and Seven Dwarfs," Tom and Jerry, Ben 10, 102 Dalmations, something in Hindi that I think was originally English, and a Hindi DVD on the origins and adventures of the Monkey God Hanuman.)

Glorious, serious fun

A skeptical mom asked:

Can you tell me how it can serve a child if they say spend hours a day watching Scooby-Doo ?

Deb Lewis responded:

I asked my son what he thought a person could get from watching cartoons. He said he's learned a lot from watching Loony Toons and especially Daffy Duck. "What?" I asked. "I learned that you really can solve all your problems with dynamite!" 🙂

Don't panic. He was being funny.

But really, maybe hours of Scooby Doo is glorious fun. Fun is serious. Fun is important, especially for kids. Don't underrate fun. People who are not happy as children seldom find easy or lasting happiness as adults.

—Deb Lewis

That and more, by Deb and by others:
SandraDodd.com/t/cartoons
photo by Sandra Dodd

Lasting happiness

"Fun is serious. Fun is important, especially for kids. Don't underrate fun. People who are not happy as children seldom find easy or lasting happiness as adults."

—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/t/cartoons
photo by Susan Burke

Lasting happiness

"Fun is serious. Fun is important, especially for kids. Don't underrate fun. People who are not happy as children seldom find easy or lasting happiness as adults."

—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/t/cartoons
photo by Susan Burke

One thing leads to something else

Mary Ellen (nellebelle) wrote, years ago:

Up to now, we have never had any video games in our house. It wasn't that I purposely avoided them, it was just something we'd never done and the girls had never asked for. I had a vague idea in my head that they were negative along the lines of TV and other electronic media. Generally, when video games make the news it is not positive. I had never before questioned these ideas. Lisa had mentioned playing a race car game at her friend's house. We decided to give the girls a Nintendo64 for Christmas. This morning I played Crusin World with Lisa. The game is full of famous landmarks. It is not totally realistic, but does match many real aspects of the countries you race through. While cruising Germany, I mentioned the autobahn. I don't know too much about it, except that people drive really fast there. This led us to consider mph vs. kph, which led to the metric vs. US system of measurement. I told Lisa that I had bought some stuff to help learn the metric system because I wanted to understand it better. She said, "We can learn it together".

It never ceases to amaze me how doing one thing can lead to learning about something else.

—Mary Ellen(nellebelle)

"Everything I really need to know I learned from video games and cheesy cartoons."
SandraDodd.com/t/cheesy

image respectfully lifted from
Launchbox Games Database

Doing well, and doing good

Deb Lewis wrote this. Who is she talking about?

They work together, plan and organize. It might inspire thoughts about the usefulness of cooperation.

They handle tough situations with humor. That might inspire someone to think about the value of a happy and positive attitude.

They help people who need help.
The people who need help ask for it.
These are good things.

—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/t/cartoons
photo by Holly Dodd—"Three Round Things"

Cats and history and folklore

Before looking at any links, you might want to try to think of a dozen or more examples of people keeping, shunning, worshiping, fearing, singing about, imagining, or poetically dancing about, or as, cats. You probably won't need to look far.

Think beyond house cats to wild and jungly, crazy, cartoony, and alien-species-imagined cats.

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Once you've thought up your own, you might check against other people's lists here:

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Cats in Literature? It’s a Long Tail

Feline Good with Our Favorite Literary Cats

Here, Kitty, Kitty… 20+ Children’s Books That Are the Cat’s Meow

The Worship of Cats

15 of the Most Famous Cat Characters in Books
That title was changed to "15 Well Known Cats in the Bookish World," but they didn't change the original title in the code. Somehow, there were discussions and disagreements there. Perhaps it was about cartoons and films.

Cats in stories and songs (a Google search link)

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scratch-art by Devyn Dodd
photo by Sandra Dodd

Learning from Cartoons

Each family discovers the value of choices in unique and wonderful ways. Well, not every family–only those who actually do start giving their children choices, and in which the adults work to see the choices they are making as well.

One surprise is that programs the parents had thought were "stupid" have led to discussion and research on the autobahn, the metric system, classic movies, technology, international sports, geography, segregation, famous speeches, sportsmanship and ethics, live theatre, opera, oil and mining, hygiene, reproduction, Australian food, life cycle of frogs, hurricane formation, trust, cooperation, classical music, Vikings, religion, art, how different animals survive the winter, Galileo, Japanese mythology, cooking, geology… this list could be twice as long without leaving that section of my website.

One trail went from a mummy cartoon to Egypt, to Pharaohs, to slavery, to the Civil War, to Abraham Lincoln, and to other presidents. The Simpsons' parody of Schoolhouse Rock led to a discussion on Thoreau and Walden.

text from page 141 (or 153) of The Big Book of Unschooling
and that page links to SandraDodd.com/t/cheesy and SandraDodd.com/t/learning
cartoon portrait by Gina Trujillo, my niece, based on this self-made photo

Enjoyment overflowing

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

Rather than asking what he'd like to learn, just do things he *enjoys*, expose him to things you think he might enjoy (as opposed to things you think would be good for him!)

Rather than looking at him as a vessel you want to fill, look at him as a person who is reaching out towards what interests him. Rather than looking at what interests him through a lens of school that filters out everything that wouldn't be done in school, look at *all* that he's interested in: video games, cartoons, skateboarding, swimming, playing with friends ...

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joyce/deschooling
photo by Roya Dedeaux