You, there. Yeah, you. The parent clutching that volume of Shakespeare in one hand and, in the other, the mean-looking sledgehammer with which you have just bashed in the TV set.
Your mission was simple: to banish the demon television from your family’s life forever.
Congratulations. By so doing, you have now officially embarked upon the most foolhardy, pointless, thankless and counterproductive endeavor in the pantheon of parental behavior: attempting to plug up the ceaseless flow of popular culture into your child’s tender little noggin.
Happy now?
Not only are your efforts doomed to failure, but they also may relegate your child to the status of a nerd.
Television is accused of many things, several of which are inarguably negative, but it offers at least one positive attribute: It is a cultural touchstone, a common reference point around which young people chronically cluster. As teachers, counselors and kids themselves will tell you, television is an instant, universal conversation-starter at an age when conversations can be excruciatingly awkward. Television topics zip effortlessly across ethnic, racial, geographic, gender and socio-economic lines with the speed of Sabrina the Teenage Witch on a solar-powered broomstick.
Don’t know Sabrina? Get yourself a peel-off “Geek” tattoo and sit out your next turn.
Clashes between parents and kids over what to watch and how often to watch it are nothing new of course. Arguing over the value of popular culture–of which television is the main standard bearer–is one of the signposts of maturation, a key stage in growing up. “I expect my daughter to protest my decisions about what she can and can’t watch on television,” said Chicago parent Inez Smith of 9-year-old Averi. “That’s what she’s supposed to do. If she didn’t, why be a child? And it’s my duty as a parent to resist and to hold to my standards.”
Adults are absolutely correct, of course, to monitor a child’s TV watching. What’s new these days is that parents have at their disposal more tools than ever before to monitor a child’s intake of television and other delivery systems for popular culture. TV sets are available with special chips enabling parents to block out objectionable programming; on-screen rating symbols, provided by networks, that warn of adult language, violence and sexual situations; gizmos that filter out slang terms and innuendoes that may make parents uneasy. Technology, however, still is no substitute for wise and thoughtful parenting, which can include the realization that forbidding a pleasure automatically increases its allure.
Indeed, many savvy parents are doing more than simply lowering the boom and declaring the medium totally off-limits: They’re recognizing that television is not just television.
It’s a social glue, a common bond. It’s the method by which kids relate to one another. Like Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, like Old Navy sweatshirts and cargo pants, TV shows are a blur of ubiquity at an age — adolescence and shortly before — when being exactly the same as everybody else is the point of life, the holy grail of existence.
Indeed, the amount of television kids watch — which hovers at about three hours per day — has been decreasing for the last several years, according to Nielsen Media Research. Although it’s impossible to pinpoint a single cause for the drop (the increasing popularity of rented videos and video games is surely a factor), more enlightened and efficacious parental attitudes also may figure in the mix.
Strictures are out. Blanket prohibitions are passe. For no matter how hard a parent tries to keep a child separated from television, television will win anyway. That’s the nature of popular culture. Lock the window, and it seeps in under the door. Cancel its passport, and it sneaks in inside somebody’s luggage.
“Television has always been important if you’re going to be in the `in’ group,” said Hal Klor, director of guidance at Lincoln Park High School on the North Side. “Some of the more old-fashioned parents or parents from other countries don’t let their kids watch TV, and the kids can feel a little left out. It makes them feel bad.”
Conscientious parents, though, are following the lead of such enlightened folks as Mara Tapp. She and her husband, a college professor, don’t try to fight television’s prominence as a cultural crucible; instead, they trust their two adolescent daughters to figure out television’s value for themselves.
“At age 4, my daughter came home one day and said, `Mom, have you ever heard of the Ninja Turtles?’ ” recalled Tapp, who has worked in Chicago non-profit media for many years. “I thought, `Uh-oh. The day we always feared is here.’ “
Tapp and her husband had never allowed their children to watch shows they considered inappropriate — and the popular cartoon “Teen-age Mutant Ninja Turtles” led the list. The moment the kids went to school and mingled with others, however, that prohibition was irrelevant.
Tapp didn’t panic, scream or chain her daughter to a library shelf. She simply had a conversation with her about the show, about the fact that its character names (e.g., Raphael) hailed from the art world. And she made certain that her children had plenty of other distractions.
“I don’t mean to sound snobby, but my children lead an interesting life. They read, they know interesting people. They see a fair number of movies and theater.”
Moreover, every month or so, Tapp and her husband bring home armfuls of videos and turn over the television in their bedroom to their daughters. The children can watch all the television they choose. “We call it the `Blowout Weekend,’ ” Tapp said with a chuckle.
They don’t, therefore, banish television or deny its influence; in fact, they pay it the ultimate compliment by taking it seriously. As a result, their daughters aren’t especially enthralled by the medium, Tapp said. “I don’t get the sense that my kids are socially retarded or misfits or unpopular.”
Candy Justice, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Memphis, knows just how powerful a socializing influence television can be — and demonstrates its might regularly to her students.
At the semester’s inception, Justice asks each student to match her or his personality with that of a character from past and present TV series. She provides a long list of such characters, including Murphy Brown, Kramer, Edith Bunker, Hawkeye, Aunt Bee, Bart Simpson, Perry Mason, Kevin Arnold, Ally McBeal and Jethro.
“I never have to explain who those people are,” Justice said. “In a class of more than 90 students, I’ve never had to explain to any more than two students who any of the characters were.”
The exercise, she added, “catches their interest. It shows them how we live in a media culture, how we really identify with television. When parents don’t let kids watch television — trying to protect them from violence, for instance — the kids miss out on the cultural reference points. Our culture is just filled with references to TV shows.”
Indeed, some teachers in the Chicago area also are using television’s pervasiveness for their own devices — a version of, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” — reported Carolyn Greenstein, a guidance counselor at Longdale Middle School in the Logan Square neighborhood.
“Just yesterday a kid came to me with a personal problem. I noticed he had a letter in his notebook, and I asked him what it was. He said, `I’m writing to Queen Latifah.’ His teacher was having them write a letter to someone they admired.” The taciturn young man was willing to confide in a TV star. “You have to get children at the level of their interests and build on that.”
Moreover, Greenstein said, “There are a lot of positive things about television that can help in the classroom. Art, music — you can get educational direction from television.”
David Bianculli, television commentator on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” and author of the 1992 book “Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously,” heartily agrees. Television, he says, is our common language, our shared heritage. If parents maintain a healthy respect for its abilities to teach and to galvanize, television can be a positive experience for families — rather than a constant bone of contention.
“Any concerned parent who uses TV constructively rather than as a baby-sitter will come out ahead,” Bianculli said. “When friends tell me they don’t watch and don’t let their children watch, I say, `It’s a whole medium you’re pushing away. That’s like pushing away a library or electricity.’ Television is what we share as a culture.”
Moreover, the push is pointless, as Kathleen Wheaton and her husband, David Welna, learned. Parents of two boys, ages 4 and 7, they recently moved to Chicago after living in Tepoztlan, a Mexican village, where television was simply unavailable.
“I heard the boys talking about TV shows one day, and I realized they were talking about what they thought the shows were about,” Wheaton said.
Wanting to be part of the crowd, her sons had simply picked up their ideas of the shows from the conversations around them, from context. “I’ve heard them have conversations about `Power Rangers’ and asking each other if they really hurt people.”
Jodi Bara, mother of an 8-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter, observed the same phenomenon: Her son seemed to know about shows that she was absolutely certain he had never watched, which appeared to render a vigilant parent’s anti-TV stance irrelevant.
“He suddenly started making swords out of sticks and playing `Power Rangers,’ ” reported Bara, who lives in a Detroit suburb.
The realization that television would infiltrate their lives — with or without their consent — changed the family’s attitude, Bara said. Instead of banning the medium altogether, she and her husband began discussing individual shows with their children. As long as television was going to be a force in their lives, they wanted it to be out in the open, she said, not some subliminal influence.
Chicago resident Inez Smith, who works for an advertising agency, recognizes that, like it or not, television plays a prominent role in the life of daughter Averi. It is part of the very air that young people breathe these days, Smith acknowledged.
“Many of her friends aren’t allowed to watch any television,” Smith reported, but that didn’t sit well with her: Wouldn’t that just make television seem more appealing? And wouldn’t that also make her daughter feel left out of conversations with her peers?
“I wanted to be aware of what’s on,” Smith said. So mother and daughter began talking regularly about which programs were appropriate. Television lost the allure of a forbidden treat.
Phyllis Ehret, a guidance counselor at Taft High School on the Northwest Side, has observed certain TV shows become increasingly important to her daughter, 15, and son, 12.
Their friends have started to chatter about “Dawson’s Creek.” Not to know about “Dawson’s Creek” might, Ehret said, relegate her children to the realm of social misfits — which opens up yet another role for television: parental sidekick.
“Since there are shows they want to watch, it’s a good tool to use, an effective reward. It’s the carrot in the carrot-and-stick approach.”
