Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

I am a parent, and a protective one at that, I will admit.  I am also a parent with gray hair, having added a child to our family when I was 45.  So I have the advantage of remembering how life was way before most of today’s parents were even born.  This is a curse and a blessing at the same time.

The world has changed a lot since I grew up in the midwest suburbs in the late 50′s and 60′s.  There is far more violence in our everyday world if you let it in.  I am talking about the media, and then the repetition of this violence by those who watch the media.

There has been a loss of innocence at the expense of the well-being of our young people.  Let me supply some specific examples.  My children are eight and six years old, and here are the things they have been exposed to without my permission.

1. My son was messing around on his little acoustic guitar and I heard him singing, “Viva, Viagra!”  Whoa – hold the phone!  “Where did you hear that song?” I asked him in as calm a voice I could muster at that surprised moment. “Oh I heard Katie singing it.”  Turns out some children watch the evening news at home, learn the song from the commercial, and end up repeating the catchy little diddy all the next day.  I know my six year old son has no idea what he is singing about, but he should be singing about the itsy bitsy spider or the cow jumping over the moon instead.  Even though I don’t allow my children to watch the news on Tv at home, my son has learned this song through a playmate.  Commercials for erectile dysfunction were not even on the air when I was growing up, so it was never an issue. I cannot keep my son from being exposed to these messages when other parents allow my son’s playmates to watch these commercials.

2. My children ran home all excited one afternoon after playing with a small group of children about five houses down on our street.  “Mom, mom, guess what Gabby told us! Some parents put their little boy in a closet and tied him up and left him there and he died!”  They were shivering with fear and looked at me with a look that I will never forget. Of course I had already read the news at my internet newservice, so I knew it was true.  But this was news I felt inappropriate for my children to learn at their age and was not sharing that story with them.  Too late, my neighborhood children usurped my parenting decision and told them anyway. With great difficulty I explained the situation to them and tried to leave them with assurance that this would never happen to them.

3. I have been reading C.S.Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia to my children, and just after we finished the first of the seven books, the movie The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was released.  I let other families go see it first and got their feedback.  It was rated PG and several friends reported that yes, the fighting scenes in the story were presented with a lot of detail.  So we did not go.  How sad.  Fortunately we were able to locate at our public library the 1988 PBS television series of the Chronicles of Narnia.  I previewed the series and deemed it suitable.  It was not sugarcoated, but it was not so detailed as to give nightmares.  At the moment when Aslan the Lion is about to be stabbed, there is a respectful cut away to the sad faces of Lucy and Susan. Our imagination can fill in the details, just as the original book allows us to do.

4. My daughter and I were shopping for some clothes in a store we no longer frequent.  While we were there a radio was on, at a louder-than-normal background volume, and it was being broadcast on speakers throughout the store.  The song was un-mistakenly a ‘you need to love Jesus’ song, and I blocked it out.  After the song, an interview began with a woman who described how God had saved her from her terrible misfortune of getting mixed up with the wrong crowd.  In great detail the woman described how her boyfriend came into her apartment and proceeded to beat her….I will spare you the details.  My daughter looked at me with wide eyes and I asked to see the manager.  By the time the manager was found, the interview was over and another ‘You Need Jesus’ song was being broadcast.  I explained to the manager that I did not feel it was appropriate to be broadcasting violent content in a store.  He asked the cashier what I was talking about, then came back at me with, “Oh, that?  You mean that testimonial album? You are talking about the Christian testimonial album?”  “Yes,” I said. “It is not appropriate for a store that sells toys and children’s clothing to be broadcasting that graphically violent content.”  “Oh, but it is just a testimony,” came the reply.  I took my daughter’s hand and we left the store.

I could go on and on with these scenarios but I think you get the point. Violent graphics, violent dialogue, and the details of every bodily function are so commonplace in print, on the screen, and in the airwaves, that young children are being exposed to mature topics at an earlier and earlier age.  The more we accept this as commonplace, the harder it will be to help children make the decision to use non-violent means of conflict resolution.  Next time you are about to repeat a tragic story you have read about or seen on the news, stop and look around you? Who else is listening?