I think perhaps my sensitivity is being restored, and I am grateful for it.
I don’t have HBO or Showtime — thankfully, as it turns out — but recently I spent a weekend in a hotel due to some apartment issues. By virtue of boredom-related channel-surfing, I caught small portions of or extended trailers/behind-the-scenes clips of the following shows and movies: True Blood, Hung, Entourage, Weeds, one of the Harold and Kumar movies, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
The language alone was enough to turn me off, but then I got to contend with violence, obscene sexual content, promiscuity, misogyny, casual drug usage, porn — basically the overall decay of American society.
As an aside: my mother was dirt-poor growing up. My grandfather was in the Air Force but worked a second job at a service station and my grandmother waited tables so my mother and her five siblings could have a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs, and food on the table. Never once was selling drugs an option — not even a last-ditch, desperate option. Way to justify breaking the law to make ends meet, Showtime.
Anyway, the more I watch on TV and in movie theaters, the more I realize just how desensitized we as consumers have become. When I was younger, Transformers 2 would’ve been rated R. I deeply regret taking my twelve-year-old niece and nephew to see it and I regret all the more that I was more affected by the sexual content than they were. From here on out, I’m going to be more vigilant about what I take them to see. My previous justifications were that their father exposes them to so much worse — including horror movies at young ages — but that is a crappy excuse. If anything, that should prompt me to protect them even more.
When I have kids, their media intake will be severely curtailed. Even stuff on Nick and the Disney Channel aren’t necessarily appropriate — I’m appalled at the level of sarcasm and parents/authority figures-as-flakes thematic content on even shows like iCarly and Wizards of Waverly Place.
A popular rebuttal to assertions like mine is that children should be exposed to “the real world” or they’ll freak out when they go out on their own. Really? I beg to differ. Through my parents and my church, I learned that smoking was bad for my health, drugs were dangerous and would affect my mental acuity, and that God designed sex for marriage. I didn’t need to put any of those assertions to the test to accept them as truth and to abide by them.
That’s why I like Alex and Brett Harris’ book, Do Hard Things, so much. Kids aren’t stupid, nor should they be allowed to abdicate responsibility for their behavior. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” I fully embrace that truth. That doesn’t mean that children and/or young adults will be perfect. Far from it, actually. But it also doesn’t mean that parents should adopt, for example, the whole “Well, they’re going to drink anyway, so I’d rather them drink in the house” approach.
Parents need to have the courage and moral fortitude to hold their kids to a higher standard. Hold them to that standard and then, if they choose to violate it, that’s on them. They will have to reap the consequences, whatever they may be.
Of course, by not exposing one’s children to a counterculture that seems bent on destroying morals and embracing all manner of hedonistic behavior will go a long way in ensuring that those children won’t be tempted to violate the higher standard in the first place.
