Children's television programmes

Children's television series are television programs designed for and marketed to children, normally scheduled for broadcast during the morning and afternoon when children are awake. They can sometimes run during the early evening, allowing younger children to watch them after school. The purpose of the shows is mainly to entertain and sometimes to educate.

Children's television is nearly as old as television itself, with early examples including shows such as Kukla, Fran and Ollie (1947), Howdy Doody, and Captain Kangaroo. Later shows for very young children include Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. There was also more children's television such as Barney & Friends, Blue's Clues, SpongeBob SquarePants, Bear in the Big Blue House, and The Big Comfy Couch.

In the United States, early children's television was often a marketing branch of a larger corporate product, such as Disney, and it rarely contained any educational elements (for instance, The Magic Clown, a popular early children's program, was primarily an advertisement for Bonomo's Turkish taffy product).

This practice continued, albeit in a much toned-down manner, through the 1980s in the United States, when the Federal Communications Commission prohibited tie-in advertising on broadcast television. These regulations do not apply to cable, which is out of the reach of the FCC's content regulations.

The effect of advertising to children remains heavily debated and extensively studied.

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