Millennial Mom Explains Pre-Internet TV to 7-Year-Old: ‘Her Jaw Dropped’

A millennial mom recorded herself trying to explain to her daughter how TV used to work before streaming, and found it was a more difficult feat than she expected.

Tobi Gilmore, 31, grew up in what she described to Newsweek as “the days of having to run for a snack during commercial breaks so you didn’t miss what you were watching.”

Her seven-year-old daughter, however, has only ever known streaming, where almost every show is at your fingertips, available to watch, pause, and rewind, to your heart’s content.

The mother and daughter from Missouri have now gone viral as Gilmore shared an exchange to her TikTok account @thegirltobi on October 17, which has over 16,000 views.

She explained the backstory to Newsweek: “My daughter asked me if I would pause the TV so she could go do something. I saw it as a ‘back in my day’ moment.

“I told her ‘when I was a kid you couldn’t pause the TV.’ She laughed because she thought I was joking,” Gilmore said, adding that her daughter then asked her why she didn’t just turn the TV off to make the show stop.

Gilmore then began recording herself talking to her young daughter, and in the video explained: “When we shut the TV off, the channel … would keep playing the show. It doesn’t stop when you turn the TV off.”

“All day long there would just be shows, 24 hours a day,” Gilmore said, before asking the camera: “Is this how you explain this?”

She used Disney as an example, as before Disney Plus allowed users to choose their shows, episodes would just be playing constantly, with a schedule on what you could watch, and if you weren’t there, “you missed it. That was it.”

She shared the experience of running to the bathroom during commercials so you wouldn’t miss any of the show, but wrote on the video that her daughter’s jaw dropped, and suspected her daughter thought she was lying.

Her daughter asked multiple questions trying to figure out what happened when the TV was off, and whether you could still see or hear the TV shows because they kept playing, while Gilmore admitted: “I didn’t realize how old this would make me feel.”

Gilmore told Newsweek that while “regular TV” still exists, you can usually pause it, and her daughter only knows streaming services.

“It was definitely hard to explain to her because I had to think of how I could say it using terms she would understand. She thought turning the television off would pause the show because that is what she knows,” she said.

She admitted the conversation “definitely made me feel old,” but revealed it wasn’t the first time, as “she once asked me if I had a landline phone when I was a kid by saying ‘did you have one of those phones with strings when you were a kid?'”

And Gilmore wondered whether the younger generation all watching different things, rather than the whole school raving over the newest episode of Hannah Montana, would affect them when they grew older.

“My friends and I still to this day can quote TV shows or movies and all know where it came from,” she said. “I wonder if when they are older they will have many common things to feel nostalgic about like people my age do.”

TikTok users related in a big way, with one writing: “My kids refer to a rotary phone as an ‘antique phone’,” while one said their kid calls regular TV “hotel mode.”

One shared: “I had the radio on one time and my nephew kept begging me to replay the song.”

Some users suggested Gilmore explain it to her daughter by comparing it to a livestream, and “if you miss it you miss it,” but she explained to Newsweek that they don’t allow their daughter on livestreams as she’s too young.

But her own father made her “feel young again” when she told him what had happened with her daughter, and he explained “when he was a kid, TV stations didn’t broadcast at night. They would ‘sign off’ for the night.

“I never knew that. I do remember as a kid him telling me they didn’t have remotes and I thought that was crazy.”

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