You are not alone. My parents never made me watch anything - whatever I watched, or read, I did all on my own. And I read the encyclopedia too. It saved my dad the problem of having 'the talk' with me.
I think we read different articles. I took nerdiness to a different level. Not only would I read the encyclopedia for fun, I would randomly decide to assign myself a topic, then would do research on it and write a report. Just for fun. I still remember my sister running to complain to my parents: "She's reading the encyclopedia again!"
My mother was very proud of the fact that I read the encyclopedia especially as she had spent so much money on buying the Encyclopedia Britannica. The other children in my family only used the encyclopedia when they had to, I alone read it for enjoyment. We also had an atlas that I used to study all the time. To this day I still firstly to a map on Iceland in atlas to see how good the map is. If it had a good map of Iceland it is a good atlas IMO.
Very rarely. My dad did ask me to watch a documentary on Finnish war-children though, because he had been one. (during ww2 finnish children were sent across the border to live with Swedish families)
Nope. They would often rent videos for me to watch, but I don't recall any of them being documentaries. If I came across one on TV that looked interesting (usually some sort of wildlife or astronomy piece), I would often watch it though, as I do now. The closest thing to a "documentary" they ever made me watch was a video called All Kids Want to Know About Sex (or something like that) when I was in about... fourth grade, I think. I guess I'd been asking some questions, and rather than have a talk about it, they must have decided I'd be better off learning about it from my usual source of information -- the television. I remember getting bored with it fairly quickly, so it would seem I wasn't that curious just yet. Never intently read the encyclopedia -- we didn't have any such books in the house. We did have a fairly extensive dictionary though, and you can bet I made good use out of that.
Yes. Every Sunday night. "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom"--way, way before cable, Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. The whole family watched "Life on Earth," because we wanted to. We also watched Carl Sagan, Jacque Cousteau and NOVA. I grew up watching shows like that, and public television in particular. We also watched the news together every night. It gave me a far more well-rounded education and perspective on matters outside my own little world.
Not as weird as you think, I was exactly the same. Started with World Book: A and worked my way through them. Never regretted it.
*Clicks that button* My dad taped a bunch of nature documentaries and I'd watch them over and over. Especially the one about horses and the one about tigers. The only one I was ordered to sit down and watch with the family was The Miracle of Life. It wasn't so bad once they got past that part at the beginning, with the semen.
Mr Light, what do you think of docos, now? Were you put off by them, or do they now appeal? Filming and voiceover techniques have improved in leaps and bounds over the last ten years. If you have a big screen TV, get Attenborough's Planet Earth DVDs, they are stunning.
No, my parents never forced me to watch documentaries-- they just forced me to go to church. I was the type of kid who would seek out documentaries on my own-- which in those days mostly meant watching PBS-- but it was a solitary activity, like most everything else I did. Nobody in my family ever appreciated anything that I appreciated. And I was another one of those kids who read the Encyclopedia for fun. In Grade School, our little library had both a regular and a science Encyclopedia, and I would check out volumes of the science Encyclopedia all the time. The Librarian used to remark that they should just give it to me, because nobody else ever looked at it. I went to my teacher to ask if they really might.
I was never forced to watch documentaries, but like many others in this thread I loved them and I would watch them of my own volition. I particularly loved animal and archeological documentaries. Not to mention that I had a fascination for this one channel that used to show surgical operations, complete with detailed commentary (I believe it was a service for those Medicine students that could not be in the operating room). I must have been around three or four at the time. Is there a "weirdo" smilie, somewhere?
It's interesting how many of us (us! My peeps!) are saying we read encyclopaedias as kids. Which, my memory and experience tells me, is far from the "norm". I remember telling guys at school I did that, and got some funny looks. This is in the days before words like geek and nerd became common currency. I became "that weird guy who reads SF and encyclopaedias." Mind you, I think it panned out in the long run. And I've managed to pass that knowledge oin to my kids to some extent.
No, only one I can think of was one of these documentaries where they'd taken cams and filmed fetuses growing and such. They thought it could be fun for me to see how a child grew inside a mother. Fascinating stuff at a low age actually, no nonsense about a stork there. Otherwise the pretty much let me watch anything, I was pretty self regulating with things seeing as if it was too scary I'd turn it off. I remember I wanted to watch Robocop at age nine since it was on and mom just said "Isn't that supposed to be bloody?" and I had no idea, it was a film about a robotic policeman how could it not be great? But they let me watch that and true enough I switched it off when Murphy got so brutally killed.
I didn't read encyclopedias, but I would read books about old mysteries, natural pheonomenon, myths.. big binders of unsolved mysteries and just general history books. I was doing that the mostly between age 9-15..