It was sometime in mid April 2020, we were all in the middle of stay at home time with outside movements totally stopped ( on our own accord). My daughter was pulled from pre-school by us once we started working from home and cases got noticed in our county and by now all pre-schools/daycare and regular schools were closed as well. We had tried our best to limit TV time to just 1 movie during weekends till now but stay at home while we worked ended up opening the floodgates to incredible amount of TV watching.
Initially she was not picky but we don't really use cable TV at home, most of our viewing is through streaming services and unlike cable this means you have to pick the content and play it. Luckily Disney+ had launched early in the year and its content library was good enough to keep the little one occupied for 3-4 hours in a day while rest of her time was spent in playing or coloring or reading stories together whenever we could spare some time between our work schedules.
So Disney magic worked wonders as expected and everything went fine until one day there was some glitch in the app and it won't play anything. I was busy with some work when this happened one weekday afternoon so didn't have time to figure out what the error code shown on screen was and try to get Disney+ back on, instead I decided to pull out the last resort option Cable TV. Thanks to my employer, I have free cable tv but we never watch that at home but I quickly got that loaded in my tv and some kids movie was on and I thought this would be something she will like and got her setup and returned to my work. Within 5 mins I got angry protests and the little one was upset again that her movie was gone. "What happened to my movie, where did my movie go" she kept saying as some insurance ad was playing on TV. Her eyes were full of tears and face had a look of being robbed of some hard earned reward. That was when I realized having never watched linear television before and just used to streaming TV in the last 3-4 months of TV watching, so she had never seen an ad before!!!
I guess we all grew up watching TV as we knew it full of Ads and sort of got used to them as a feature and in fact my wife says ( and its true of many others I knew) that as a kid she liked Ads more than what was on TV and would get upset when Ads went away and some other regular grown ups program came on. I tried explaining this concept called ads but the her movie resumed soon and she went back to it. I guess she got used to the concept eventually and by end of the day started humming that super annoying insurance ad jingle!
