Exercising our Parental Control or the most exciting post ever (insert sarcasm)

I'm trying to figure out the parental controls on Verizon Fios because I'm not at all happy with Noah's television viewing choices. I could go on a rant about Disney but I don't think I need to, because if you have kids and cable you probably already know the crap "tween" shows they are putting out.

Since Noah has an inability to filter out the unreasonable from the reasonable the "humor" in those shows, which I find highly NOT funny most of the time, is also highly inappropriate for Noah.

Except that there are a few shows I'm OK with, and kind of enjoy. Wizards of Waverly place anyone? Phineas and Ferb?

We blocked Disney XD several months ago, but that wasn't a perfect answer because there were still shows on the regular Disney channel I didn't like. Plus he finds other stuff on other channels. And then Rich changed out the DVR and all my settings disappeared a few months ago.

I know some of you are asking yourself why I don't just forbid him to watch those shows. And considering he requires near 100% supervision which I find impossible to provide I know what he is watching most of the time. The problem is that telling him he can't watch something always turns into a fight, and sometimes most of the time I'm just not up to that fight, because 9 times out of 10 it escalates to a major melt down mostly his. But if I make the television the one saying "no" it rarely results in more than a grumble from him.

This week during one of the few hours I was awake (sick, again, ughh) and on the couch I decided to figure out the channel ratings.

I had to play with them some to figure out how to block the shows I don't want him to see, but ended up setting the limit to Y7, which means the shows are appropriate for everyone 7 and older.

So now it seems to be blocking out the shows I don't want, and it takes the pressure off mean mommy.

But now Rich and I can't watch anything without having to put a code into the remote. And that is kind of a pain in the ass. I'm not sure how long Rich is going to be able to take it until he reaches his frustration limit. Like today during a playoff game when the channel shut off at 8pm because the rating automatically changed from "general" to "PG" and he had to fumble for the remote and enter the code. Or how long it takes before Noah realizes the code and we have to reset it. (Or how many shows are going to get saved on the DVR with the title "adult title" so we look like all we watch is p0rn.)



Wow, this was an exciting post.