I just wanted to get an idea of how other parents felt about their kids TV habits. I often feel like my kids would be more excited about educational things like flash cards or puzzles if there was no TV. Or more specifically, no crappy cartoons like Ben10 or Super Hero Squad (I would never tell them that though. I know I loved that stuff as a kid too)!...like others have said, my kids have learned from things like the science channel and the nasa channel (which by the way, has some great kids programming, although it's only on for short periods at a time).
And, yes, I do notice that some kids seem to pull learning out of everything they do, including watching TV, while other kids just seem to play for the sake of playing or watch TV just to enjoy the show.
It was a lifestyle choice to not own a TV that my husband and I made before we had kids, but it most definitely never resulted in my kids wanting to do flash cards.
. The two older children spent most of their time taking whatever toys they had and repurposing them into made up games or worlds. We went to the library two or three times a week and checked out armfuls of books, and they played outside a lot. By the time the youngest was born, there were DVD's and streaming videos online so that he grew up absorbing a lot more time watching videos. But he didn't just sit and watch - he would stop, back up the video and watch parts again and again until it drove me crazy.
I tried to institute a family tradition of all of us watching a movie together once a year on Christmas Eve, but after three years, I gave up. No one actually watched the video but me. The rest of them spent the entire time analyzing lighting techniques, tearing apart fallacies in the plot or discussing historical facts about some building that showed up in the film for a few seconds.
