This Morning/Gogglebox

Doodledog

It’s not a children’s programme. I know that it’s watched by a lot of parents at home with children, but IMO it’s up to them to ensure that their children don’t see things that they feel are inappropriate. If they aren’t comfortable with a topic they can switch it off.

I believe that the biggest audience for This Morning is students, and the topic is something that might interest them. There are whole channels devoted to children’s tv, and I don’t think that adult programming should have to adapt its content in case parents are using tv as a babysitter.

I appreciate it’s not a children’s programme or channel but don’t agree that parents are necessarily using the Tv as a babysitter. We are retired and home a lot during the day but don’t watch daytime television but what about the grandparents who do watch it, perhaps had their grandchildren over during the holidays, and had left the room for a few minutes while this was being aired, they wouldn’t have expected this type of thing being showed in the morning. After the watershed of 9 I quite agree we should expect to see swearing, sex etc.,

Puzzlelove if a parent or grandparent is out of the room what is to stop the child/children from scrolling through the channels?

The watershed only applies to BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Chanel’s 4 & 5, Sky, Netflix and the rest of the streaming services including ITVX, BBCiplayer, My5 do not have a 9pm watershed, anything is available to watch anytime if the day.

People can't have it all ways. You could say 'what about' to a number of situations, but the bottom line is that all TV before 9.00pm can't reasonably be expected to be suitable for young children.

Either parents or grandparents want to screen what their children see, in which case don't leave them alone when a TV is airing a programme for an adult audience, or put a children's channel on instead of something aimed at a more general audience. If they are willing to accept that watching TV with children will run the risk that they might see something that they personally don't feel is suitable, then it's not reasonable to complain when it does.

We all have different points of view about what is ok for children to view, anyway, so we all need to take responsibility for what our own children see. I would rather they saw an item about sex toys (which I doubt they would understand anyway) than news about murder or war that could scare them and make them anxious.

If I'd felt uncomfortable about anything shown on a magazine show that I was watching when they were there I would have distracted them or turned it off, as I'd know that it was aimed at me, not at them. Children would probably rather be watching CBeebies or whatever in any case - or doing something more interesting. If someone has This Morning on when looking after three year olds they aren't considering their needs in the first place.

Consequently when my children were young I didn't put the 6.00 News on when they were there, and watched News at Ten instead when they were in bed. I didn't expect the rest of the population to do the same though, as many people like to catch up with the News in the early evening.