It's an online battle protecting kids these days
January 19, 2007
Andrea Gordon
You can hardly blame modern parents for feeling like bewildered bystanders in the technology revolution that defines their children's lives.
Those of us raised when Rob and Laura Petrie slept in twin beds on The Dick Van Dyke Show did not come to parenthood prepared to battle the onslaught of media messages aimed at our kids. Or steady doses of sex and violence delivered by the digital box, rap stars or YouTube.
Back in the day, we cowered behind our parents when, once a year, the Wicked Witch of the West made her appearance on a fuzzy TV screen. Now we cower at the notion that at the neighbour's house in front of an unsupervised screen, our children are only a mouse click from viewing Britney's crotch shots or Saddam Hussein's hanging.
On Wednesday, a coalition of educators, parents and police called for new measures to protect kids and youth from exposure to media violence. They included: amending the Criminal Code hatred laws to protect girls and women; legislation to limit violent radio and TV until after 9 p.m.; and an age-based classification system for music, similar to those existing for films, music videos and video games.
Even in the unlikely event their proposals are acted upon, they amount to the Dutch boy putting a finger in the dyke when a tsunami is coming. What's notable is the anguished plea for help it represents – something many in the child-rearing trenches identify with.
Of course it's parents' responsibility to be vigilant, to monitor, to teach the kids critical thinking about the media that saturates their lives. But really, we could do with a hand now and then. It's hard to hover 24/7.
Why should we be all alone out here fending off Grand Auto Theft and Girls Gone Wild and all the other sex and violence being flung into the marketplace and so easily accessible to tech-smart kids? Especially when we are so hopelessly defenceless against the tidal wave. And when our offspring know more than we do about navigating the endless forms of entertainment at their fingertips.
It's a helplessness writer Caitlin Flanagan summed up eloquently in The Atlantic. She noted that once upon a time, before entertainers and commerce had untrammelled access to youth, parents could count on society to at least support minimum standards on what kids saw and heard and read. But no more. These days, anything goes.
"The `it takes a village' philosophy is a joke," Flanagan wrote, "because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it."
So how do you protect your children from it? Short of moving to a cave – and making sure it's out of the wireless zone.
Even more challenging, how do you "protect" them from it while also helping them master the creative, educational and positive potential of technology and instant communications? It's not as simple as Just Say No, or unplugging the computer.
Kids learn from an early age that mastering technology is their ticket to the future. As a grade school child I know pleaded recently, "But only nerds don't have cellphones!" (And no, he didn't get one.)
But when is it too much?
Years ago, the anthropologist Margaret Mead labelled television the second parent because of the time kids spent with it. Today, there is an entire digital family battling for your child's attention, including MSN, iPod and the Xbox. All so seductive, and with a treacherous side.
Solutions to "managing the technology" only work for so long. Enforced time limits are fine until they hit the age where teachers start assigning research on the computer. And then, oh yeah, they need to check the hockey standings. And, just a few more minutes, because they really need to instant-message some friends about the group project. Before long, the time limit thing is shot.
Put the computer in a common area, experts tell us. But most teens can open and shut windows and type in code way faster than most parents can read.
We can monitor media purchases too. But when you head out to buy a computer game for your 10-year-old, be prepared to wade through piles of gunplay first. And to pick through stacks of CDs with parental advisories they can download anyway.
Instilling media literacy in the next generation is our only hope – teaching them how to make judgments on what they're exposed to and to consider the source. Even that is an uphill battle. But at least this is one area where schools, teacher unions and advocacy groups are joining forces to help parents, through surveys, public awareness like this week's coalition announcement, educational material and websites.
In his 1982 book The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman wrote that attempting to control the media's access to one's children amounts to an act of rebellion. There are two parts to that: limiting your child's exposure to media; and monitoring what they're exposed to while providing a running critique of its themes and values.
"Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing," Postman wrote.
Not very encouraging, given that this was long before we'd heard of cyberspace and earbuds. But even more important.
Toronto Star