Thursday, August 24, 2006

I was cooking dinner last night when I saw a commercial that showed a woman talking to TV characters telling them they were too violent for her kids and she was going to have to block them. And I wondered: Where did she come from?

It's not the parents' responsibility to police what her kids watch. It's the network's.

I had to go to the bathroom, so once I got settled I changed the channel to the one on in the kitchen. I saw another commercial that showed a man telling a TV character that his portrayal of drug addiction was to intense for the kids, and the dad was blocking him.

In the dining room, I watched CSI as we ate dinner.

I needed coffee for this morning, so I made sure to turn on the TV in the headrest of my van and turned up the volume so I could listen. Since the only place in the world there isn't a TV is the supermarket, I opened my cell phone to watch a tv show streamed to my phone.

Then it struck me: There is a tv in every room in our house. From the moment we wake up, to the moment our eyes close, the TV is on. Frequently, you can walk from room to room and not miss a moment of your movie (unless it's on digital cable: that's only in two rooms).

My parents didn't get a TV in their houses until their late teens. They hadn't witnessed the number of murders I had by the time I hit the same age. They just listened to them on the radio. They weren't parked in front of the TV as soon as they could sit upright.

Today, TV is the babysitter. We put a DVD in and let the kids watch it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over so the little bastards will shut the fuck up and let us live our lives. We have TVs in the car so all the sugar they eat will be stored up for use in the classroom, while they absorb seventy more commercials before they have to face 8 hours without seeing a cereal ad.

So here's my point. Instead of blocking a channel or show with objectionable content, make you kids play outside!

1 Comments:

Blogger MissMuse said...

When the question is who is responsible for what children watch on TV, the parents or the network, I think both need to be involved. The networks definitely should not be broadcasting anything gorily violent say between 230 and 8 p.m., but if they do, it certainly is the parents responsibility to monitor what the kids are watching. Too many people use TV as a baby sitter and that's wrong. If a child comes across something inappropriate the parents need to be there to talk to them.

9:53 AM  

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