> All I can remember was cartoons - but were kids spending hours glued to the screen watching cartoons?
In the US in the past few decades? Yes. Absolutely.
Going back to at least the 1990s a kid could watch cartoons before school and then for several hours afterwards on broadcast channels.
For households with basic cable there were also very popular networks running all day full of children’s content (Disney Channel, Nickelodeon etc.)
These networks were very successful because they excelled at grabbing attention and keeping eyeballs on screens. For one example of these corners of hyper-popular children’s entertainment that kept kids glued to screens before YouTube just look at the works of Dan Schneider.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Schneider
In the US in the past few decades? Yes. Absolutely.
Going back to at least the 1990s a kid could watch cartoons before school and then for several hours afterwards on broadcast channels.
For households with basic cable there were also very popular networks running all day full of children’s content (Disney Channel, Nickelodeon etc.)
These networks were very successful because they excelled at grabbing attention and keeping eyeballs on screens. For one example of these corners of hyper-popular children’s entertainment that kept kids glued to screens before YouTube just look at the works of Dan Schneider. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Schneider