Did anybody grow up with Psalty?
My children saw it, when it was on. That was not often, though.
When we lived in Minnesota. We moved from there in mid 1983, so before that.
We had that and a couple other shows I could let my children watch without worrying. I could actually trust these enough to walk away and let them watch alone! Now Sesame Street -- I had to learn to watch it with them. They learned discriminating TV watching through Sesame Street, because when something was not right, we talked.
Happily, my kids were not big fans of Sesame street for very long, and they thought "Barney was retarded".
Though they did like the Wiggles quite well. My brother's kids went ape for the Wiggles, he even took them to their
concerts a couple of times.
That "cold spaghetti" song still gets stuck in my head occasionally.
Sesame Street taught a whole lot of New Age stuff, about which I wanted my children to know the answers. My solution was to, as I wrote, watch it with them and discuss it. I did not shield them from it.