I hear you and agree.

I'm not so sure. I was a nanny last summer and the cartoons on Nick Jr., like Bubble Guppies and Team Umizoomi, were great. The children loved them and counted and spelled right along with the show.

Now, if you mean cartoons for older children, those can be pretty bad.

Dora the Explorer is good. Pixar movies are great. There are still Arthur episodes coming out I think and Simpsons... There are plenty of adult cartoons like Family Guy which shouldn't be watched by kids of course. Even though there are plenty of crappy cartoons like Spongebob, I don't find that any less crappy than oldies like The Jetsons.

Seconding Pixar movies. We watch Wild Kratz and Dinosaur Train on PBS. Those are great for little ones.

I generally let my son watch what he wants. If it's got inappropriate content, we discuss why things like that aren't okay to do in real life. This tends to work better than pretending things like that don't exist.

I lot of them seem to include things inappropriate for young children.