February
12, 2005
Parents Aren't Powerless Over What Kids Watch
By
Froma Harrop
Bob
Thompson tells me he's talked to sixth-graders who could
quote chapter-and-verse from HBO's "Sex and the City."
This surprised Thompson, who is director of the Center for
the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.
And it shocked me. I'm barely mature enough
to have watched that raunchy show. I loved "Sex and
the City," but it made me blush. Children have no business
tuning in.
So whose fault is it when they do? Politicians
say it's
Hollywood's fault. Hollywood says it's the parents' fault.
Parents say it's the politicians' fault for not stopping
Hollywood.
Before those pointed fingers hurt anyone,
let us pin down the
problem: It's not so much what's on television, but what
children are seeing. So before parents point a finger, they
should lift it. They do have tools to control what their
children watch.
"People are screaming bloody murder
that there's bad stuff on
TV," Thompson says, "but the little things they
can do, they're not doing." More on those tools in
a minute.
Television isn't going back to the days
of "Honey, I'm home!"
and husbands sleeping in beds four yards from their wives'.
Nor should we want it to.
The big change started with the 1970s series
"All in the
Family." No one had heard characters like Archie and
Edith Bunker talk about abortion, impotence and their raw
prejudices on family-hour TV. (A warning preceded the show.)
Before that, nothing had been broadcast that a 7-year-old
couldn't handle.
Television has turned progressively lewd,
foul-mouthed and
offensive. The trade-off is that it has become more grown-up
and in many ways more interesting. Which cop show would
you rather watch, the childish "CHiPs" of the
1980s or today's "CSI"?
Vulgar and gritty TV is here to stay. The
goal is to keep
children away from it.
So back to the tools, or what Thompson
lists as "the minimal
things" parents can do. First there's the V-chip. Remember
that? The V-chip lets adults block certain programming based
on one of eight ratings.
The
most restrictive rating is TV-Y, designed for children age
2 to 6. It bars even frightening cartoons. The least limiting
category is TV-MA, which cuts out programming meant for
mature audiences only. This means shows with graphic violence,
explicit sex and crude language.
The V-chip is required on most televisions
sold in the last five
years, yet few parents bother with it. "Only a tiny
percentage is actually learning how to use the V-chip,"
Thompson reports, "and it's not hard to do."
For
more information about the V-chip, visit the FCC website
at www.fcc.gov/vchip.
The site offers a link to the directions.
The next thing parents can do, Thompson
says, is to take the
television out of their children's bedrooms. "It's
like a liquor cabinet if you have little children in the
house." Parents can keep better track of TV viewing
when it takes place in the family room.
I
marvel at how those sixth-graders got through to "Sex
and the City" -- and how little their parents did to
stop them. First off, the family had to have cable, which
their parents paid for. HBO is a premium channel, so the
parents had to pay extra for that. Most cable systems offer
a "parental control" feature that locks objectionable
channels. The parents obviously didn't use it. Nor did they
activate the V-chip, if they had one.
If the kids saw "Sex and the City"
at a friend's house, the
parents didn't adequately supervise where they went. If
the kids saw it in the privacy of their own bedrooms, then
the parents had ignored warnings against putting sets there.
Finally, I can't rule out the horrifying
possibility that the
parents didn't really mind if their sixth-graders watched
"Sex and the City." For all I know, they may have
watched it together as family entertainment.
Parents do deserve more sympathy than offered
so far. Protecting children from the rough content on TV
is a much harder challenge today than a generation ago.
But parents are far from powerless. Ultimately, nothing
comes into the house that they don't permit. And, as a last
resort, they can always smash the television set.
©2005
Providence Journal Co. Distributed by Creators Syndicate
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