Jonah, you write that you “have nothing but admiration for parents who manage to ban TV entirely from their kids’ lives.” Surely not. There’s plenty that’s rubbish (or worse) on television, and there’s plenty that’s not. What’s more, like it or not (and I like it) television is an essential part of our culture. For parents to try to control what their children watch is absolutely within their rights, perfectly understandable, often necessary, and frequently futile, but to deny their offspring the entire medium is, I suspect, to ensure a certain degree of cultural illiteracy. FWIW, I wrote a bit about a related topic here.