You’ll also now know more than is fit for an adult to know about children’s television and books. The most passionate discussions you’ll have with other parents is which TV character you loathe the most and which fairy tale is the most disturbing.
For the record, mine are: Bing, the pathologically whiny bunny, and the original Rapunzel where she’s dumped in a desert for being a ho, and her boyfriend is blinded by thorns and left to wander the backwoods for years as a beggar. Sweet dreams, kids!
Despite all the warnings about screen time turning your precious child into Sloth from The Goonies, you will form an amiable, co-parenting relationship with the television and its unmatched ability to keep your juvenile delinquent still and silent for whole MINUTES at a time.
It does, however, mean you will be exposed to some of the most painful ‘entertainment’ ever created.
Like Yo Gabba Gabba, which is, as far as I can tell, the adventures of a grown man who carries around a suitcase filled with animated sex toys.
Or In The Night Garden, which is, for all intents and purposes, a glance inside the acid-fuelled nightmares of a bunch of psychology students who are clearly using our children as test subjects for a study into subliminal warfare.
There’s Bananas in Pyjamas, the very sad tale of a couple of mentally challenged anthropomorphised fruit people, who routinely mangle the most simple of tasks only to be taken advantage of by their ‘friend’—the most malicious, conniving and self-centred Rat you’ll ever meet.
And of course, there’s Bing, the pathetically inept bunny who will teach your children the value of whining incessantly until a disturbingly small ragdoll guardian creature steps up to explain how to not be a frigging moron and cleans up all his messes.
Don’t even get me started on Hoopla Doopla and the deeply unnerving compound in which these mute clowns live and work, with seemingly no contact with the outside world and no way in which to communicate other than mediocre stunts and slapstick banality.
You might think reading is a safer pastime but on closer inspection, you’ll find books aren’t always the answer either.
We’ve got Where is The Green Sheep?, where kids will learn to ignore the desperate cries of the community who are clearly concerned for their whereabouts.
There’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which will make your children believe that eating until you slip into a coma will give you wings.
What about the Aussie classic The Very Cranky Bear, in which a turgid bully threatens and demeans a bunch of friends until a poor little sheep disfigures herself by shaving off half her wool so he’ll leave them alone for a few minutes? Excellent life lesson for kids there.
But worst of all is the Dr Seuss classic The Cat in the Hat. A Cat man preys on two children whose mother has left them alone and unsupervised and forces them to engage in a variety of increasingly unpleasant activities. They clearly don’t want to get involved but they are at the mercy of this stranger, who is probably on some sort of watchlist somewhere.
It should be noted that Dr Seuss was not actually a doctor. It was a self-appointed title. Which makes sense.
Once you enter this world, you will find yourself enraged, appalled, alarmingly invested and worryingly knowledgeable about characters you’ll know on a first-name basis: Peppa, Thomas, Bluey, Duggee, Ben and Holly.
But not enough to turn the TV off. That would just be madness.