Television: Part I: Parental Locks

This week, I took advantage of the "parental lock" on our digital cable T.V. I knew the day would come - I just didn't think I would need to use it now.

Some background: the boys wake up REALLY early in the morning, so we let them watch T.V. in our family room. Usually they watch CNN because the choices at 6:00 a.m. are news, cartoons that they outgrew when they were 4 or infomercials. But, at some point, they discovered a channel that I think is called "Real TV". What caught their eye when they were flipping channels was lights and sirens - for whatever reason, the boys are still fascinated with firetrucks and police cars.

The problem: this weekend, the boys were playing with their hot wheel cars, and Andrew pulled over Mark for drunk driving and being "passed out" at the wheel. I about gave myself whiplash turning to see what they were talking about. A few questions later and they showed me the channel. It is like COPS on steroids. Talk about a parenting reality check!

So, I activated the parental lock and blocked that channel. If only I had a videotape of the next morning when the boys were trying to figure out what happened to their channel. They tried for awhile to figure out the password and then gave up. I was so smug at being able to outsmart the 9 year olds, until they got savvy with On Demand.

Around September 11th, On Demand Discovery channel had a show about the Twin Towers. Mark still wants to be a firefighter, so you can imagine why he was drawn to some of the footage. But, not exactly the footage that I would have preferred the boys to be exposed to at their age. The downside to the parental lock is that it doesn't work On Demand. How could a cable company give you the ability to control your kids worlds and then leave a great big loophole?

Not one to give up easily, I resorted to a low-tech solution: The remote control goes to bed with me. And, the boys are too lazy to manually change the channel from the one it is on before I go to bed: CNN.