In an on-demand world, can parents retain control?

There hasn't been a lot of research into the effects of media-at-will on growing minds, according to Dr. Michael Rich of the Center on Media and Child Health. (victor juhasz)

When I was a pint-size TV junkie of a kid, I lived a life beholden to the television schedule. On Saturdays, I would wake up shortly after dawn and spend hours awaiting the start of Saturday Morning Cartoons. When I grew older, I watched "Charlie's Angels" reruns after school, chiefly because they were on.

My daughter, at the tender age of almost-4, has a totally different perspective on TV. If she's in the mood for "Caillou," the PBS cartoon about a whiny and bald little boy, that's what she sees before dinner, as I hold my nose and download it from cable-on-demand. If she requests a highlight reel from the "American Idol" finale, I can oblige; it's stored under "until-I-delete" on the DVR.

And if a new show strikes her fancy - lately, she's been into PBS's reading-prep show "Super Why" - we sometimes have an awkward conversation.

"That show isn't on right now," I tried to explain to her once, in the late afternoon. "And it's not, um, on demand. We watched it this morning live."

Live? She didn't understand.

Today's wealth of customer-driven, see-it-when-you-want TV is a revelation for adults, who have won a glorious freedom from the networks's long hegemony. For more and more people, live TV has become a special, rarefied category of viewing, reserved for sports and "Idol"-style reality contests. And even those shows can be time-shifted: You don't have to start watching until the kids are tucked in bed, the dishes are done, and the laundry is in the wash. On an episode of "The New Adventures of Old Christine" last year, one character urged another to TiVo "Idol," and got this response: "We're watching it live. Like animals!"

But imagine what live TV sounds like to a little kid: not quaint so much as absolutely alien. If you were born into an on-demand world, every form of media - not just TV - seems ever-available and malleable. Satellite radio offers a playback option, in case you need to hear The Wiggles's "Big Red Car" two or three more times. Computers represent a wealth of "Sesame Street" games. TV shows can be paused mid-stream if you need to use the bathroom, or Mom is pestering you to feed the fish. The 15-second-rewind button lets you relive that funny thing Curious George just did.

It's a nice world, when you're 3. Yet I sometimes wonder if my daughter is missing something if she isn't forced to wait for precisely what she wants. Is there some deep psychological benefit to waiting another day for "Dragon Tales"?

For enlightenment, I called Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital. To my direct question, he said, the answer is, "Who knows?" There hasn't been a lot of research into the effects of media-at-will on growing minds. But used too liberally, he said, TV-on-demand can be a trap. If there's nothing good on TV, after all, that's good reason to turn the set off.

"Today's parents feel an obligation to entertain their kids, to keep their kids busy at all times, to have something going on for them," Rich said. "Often that takes the form of media, because parents can't be 'on' all the time."

And a steady diet of fast-paced kids's shows can carry particular risks, said Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a psychiatrist at the Judge Baker Children's Center and Harvard Medical School. Today's kids, more than in generations past, complain about being bored, he told me. It's the difference between seeing a movie at the multiplex once every week or two and watching "SpongeBob SquarePants" on a whim.

"Kids become used to a lot of quick stimulation, which then becomes part of their expectation that they should be getting a lot of entertainment," he said. If school doesn't live up to TV's song-and-dance routine, he says, some kids seem inclined to tune out.

A pause here to run through the disturbing statistics about kids and TV. According to Rich, 51 percent of Americans keep their TVs on nearly all the time; 63 percent watch meals in front of the tube. Sixty-eight percent of kids between 8 and 18 have televisions in their bedrooms. Poussaint said 19 percent of 1-year-olds have TVs in their bedrooms, too.

But let's assume that many parents understand that TV is best used in moderation. If you're also willing to turn off the set, then TV-at-your-whim can be a terrific parenting tool. I can't keep my daughter from liking "Caillou" - and believe me, I've tried using reason - but at least I know the show is age-appropriate. I've managed to shield her from the existence of a dinosaur named Barney, as well as from the knowledge of most violent cartoons. (I once tried watching "Tom and Jerry" with her. Yikes. The glory days of limited kids's entertainment weren't so blissful, either.)

The glorious DVR, meanwhile, allows me to fast-forward through commercials - essential for a network show like "Idol" - and, with enough advance warning, store up enough acceptable shows to satisfy her and me.

It turns out, I'm not the only parent to draw these conclusions. In his new book "Anytime Playdate," Dade Hayes argues that the preschool TV landscape, the subject of much hand-wringing, does offer some serious teaching and parenting tools.

And plenty of parents have figured out ways to make the most of new media. On Comcast, the country's largest cable provider, 53 million children's shows were viewed on demand nationwide last month - 6 million of them in New England, where kids's shows account for nearly one-third of all free on-demand views. Technology gives less ammunition to those folks who say with pride, and with noses slightly raised, that they never let their children near the tube.

I'm not sorry, after all, that my daughter is aware of "Dancing With the Stars," especially since she can watch it on Friday mornings, when it doesn't interfere with bedtime. And I trust that she'll soon figure out the mechanics of this brave new world. She's already a whiz at the "pause" button.

As Rich points out, kids are the ones who tend to be earliest technology adopters. Today, my daughter is pointing out the letter "S" on "Super Why." Before long, she'll be texting her friends to discuss the latest plot turns on "iCarly." Except that she won't be watching it live - I'm going to make her wait until her homework is done.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to viewerdiscretion.net.