Up until recent years, the only way to keep our children from viewing television shows that were inappropriate for them to see was to change the channel or turn the television off altogether. Thankfully, today parents have options that that can help make sure that their children only see programming meant for them.

It was during the 1970's that television programming became more prone to have content that was not good for the entire family. Before that, most programming could be viewed by anyone in the home.

When certain cable channels like HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime became so popular, the content of the programming became less and less family friendly. Parents liked the more adult oriented shows, but it could be difficult to keep children from seeing and hearing what they probably should not.

Satellite television offer so many options with things like pay per view, the number of channels that you can have through different packaging, receivers for any television in your home, and the very popular ability to be able to rate and block television shows.

Being able to use your satellite remote to personalize your television viewing is terrific for parents. You are able to limit access to shows that have mature audience ratings or you can block certain channels all together on one television and have complete access to them on another television. This is a marvelous feature.

As your children grow, programming can be adjusted for their maturity level. The satellite remote allows the parent to use a password that only they know and this ensures that the programming can not be changed by youngsters who know as much about programming technical things as the parent does.

It would be unfair to censor all programming that television offers today. Adults have the right to watch what they want to watch, but in the past people with children many times objected to many television shows for fear their children would be exposed to them. This is no longer an issue because of the parental controls. Parents have the control today if they will only use it.

Those of us who have children realize that there are many things in the world that our kids need to be protected from. Other people can not be expected to stop driving cars because our child might decide to play in the streets. It is the parent's responsibility to prevent their child from playing in the street and the same principle must be applied to television viewing.