I’ve only just started reading this thread, and have just watched the documentary - it was really fascinating. My parents would have been about the same age as the first couple, and had two children by 1969 (I came along a couple of years later).
@JustGoClickLikeALightSwitch What I remember about the early 1970s, there wasn’t such a negative view about television at all. (Although I have occasionally encountered friends of my age who say they weren’t “allowed to watch ITV” when they were growing up, as their parents considered it not quite the thing!). TV was very very sparse - there was maybe an hour of programmes for children in the late morning / lunchtime (“watch with mother”), but that was pretty much it, until later on. And children’s programmes were quite gentle.
Parenting (in late 60s early 70s) was also very weirdly strict and weirdly lax, all at the same time… so instances where I was put outside in the garden, in the pram, for lengthy periods of time, in the winter, as a new-ish baby, with a hot-water bottle tucked in at the side of the pram - as the current parenting theory said that it was good for babies to be outside.. Also leaving babies in prams outside shops while you did the shopping (as prams weren’t allowed in shops). Also I remember playing out in the street unsupervised from a very early age - and being taken on a walk to a canal bridge, and onto the canal towpath (maybe a mile away) by my siblings and some of the other kids in the street, when I was only 3! But childhood also felt fairly strictly controlled - smacking, lack of agency (as a child). It’s all very odd to look back on now!