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while watching TV may not be the ideal activity for our children sometimes it is acceptable trade off.
Please help me find some legal online resources of quality cartoons for toddler.
In my case: language English, country UK, 1.5 year old happy toddler
I'd agree that 1.5 is a bit young for watching much of anything.
Does your solution absolutely have to be online? I've had great fun buying DVDs of 70s and 80s children's series (and watching them with my kids!). The advantage is that they're often very short (5-10 minutes), self contained, and don't give rise to meltdowns when you stop them.
Another idea would be just pulling a few YouTube videos into a playlist, quite a few of those kids' programs are available there.
I'd also consider looking for things that aren't 'stories' - at 1.5 I think they'd benefit more from music - there are some really nice nursery rhyme videos on YouTube too.
We personally love the show "Peep and the Big Wide World" -- it encourages science and exploration for toddler age kids and up. Go to www.peepandthebigwideworld.com for free episodes, along with lots of learning games. Hope this helps!
Kids don't know what's boring, and what's not until we teach them. In my opinion it is wrong to assume that kids should only watch programs specifically designed for kids. As such assuming that only cartoons will do is just going to enforce a stereotype that we have invented. Certainly as children get older they want to graduate onto things that they can understand, and this is where kids TV comes into it's own, but at age 18/24 months they will find just the sight of someone talking just as stimulating as a cartoon. I have found that rolling news channels* have a mix of colour and enough different faces/voices to keep my child entertained, also documentaries, animal/wildlife programs, the odd music video too. Quiz shows, daft as they sound are brilliant, they have loads of people, animated shiny/sparkly scoreboards and such, and they'll love to learn to clap and laugh when the audience does etc.
If it has to be cartoons and online, then cBeebies on BBC iPlayer is a good choice. I personally like the recommendation by another user of kids DVDs, you can get stuff from when you were younger that your kids will enjoy as much as you did. A friend bought "Button Moon" for her child and he loves it, plus they are much cheaper than some of the more modern programmes.
If you need to get stuff done, by a play-pen and put the baby in the play pen.
Don't put the TV on for a 16 month old toddler. Just don't.
