Being a parent in the age of streaming TV

Sometimes before you know it, your kid has watched three hours of television. And when you realize it, you really feel awful as a parent. Or at least I do. 

In the quest to have more self care as an adult, we often let our kids have the remote and just go to town on weekend mornings. They watch TV, we go on the exercise bike for 30+ minutes — it's a win for everyone. This would be all well and good if there was a stopping point on television. Unless you enact parental controls (which we should) there isn't. 

The kids can watch HOURS of, for example, "Bluey" — an easily digestable and wonderful 8-minute show. This is starkly different than my childhood, when Saturday cartoons ended and something I didn't want to watch came on. 

This forced me to self-regulate my TV watching. I turned it off and did something else without a screen. Because there are so many options for watching TV, kids can just flip around and find anything they want and not move from the couch. 

Now, we're not the greatest examples as parents either — what does a kid think when we tell them to turn off the TV while we're looking at our smartphones — but parenting in this technological age is super complex. 

What is the answer to this issue? I have no idea, but I know I need to be better as a parent when it comes to streaming TV (and also looking at my phone) because if I'm not, two seasons of "Bluey" will have been watched and the cycle will continue.