As a friendly counterpoint, my parents limited the time that I watched TV when I was young (mostly pre-ubiquitous-internet, so it probably implies limiting internet time somewhat). I’m just sharing my experience.

I got to pick what I watched and when; I just got 30 minutes or an hour a day. I mostly tried to catch the latest Dragon Ball Z episode.

The general strictness of my parents lead to severe rebellion, and that got me into all sorts of trouble (so it definitely wasn’t all a good thing). Now that I’ve matured a bit, I enjoy not having much of a TV habit (I find that I self-titrate internet content in a healthy way as well). I’m actually pretty grateful for the limits.

I don’t have kids, and I don’t know what I would do regarding this posted question, but I thought that I would share that I have very positive feelings concerning my parents’ decision to impose a limit on TV consumption time. I filled the rest of my time reading books, and that’s a very fulfilling time-sink to this day.

Also relevant: I think a lot of the streaming-video content available today (Netflix and others) has a lot more intrinsic value than most of the TV content when I was young. There are so many brilliant writers producing theses shows nowadays that my parents’ sentiment may not really apply to all the content. Even something like Cocomelon (we put it on in social settings if someone’s got their kids with them) is just better than Rugrats as far as providing entertaining wholesome/halfway-informative content.