From the WSJ Opinion Archives
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Virtually Home Alone
Why don't parents control their kids' media consumption?
A survey published Wednesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation has made waves by showing just how much children are exposed to media. It's not only TV anymore. When you factor in all the new gadgets and outlets--DVDs, videos, music, the Internet, computer video games, etc.--the average kid gets 8 1/2 hours of exposure every day. The study, conducted among children ages 8 to 18, says that more and more kids absorb this stuff in the privacy of their own bedrooms.
Predictably, the Kaiser findings have led a bipartisan group on Capitol Hill to call for a government study into media's effects on children. To that suggestion, Sen. Hillary Clinton added a more intuitive proposal. She wants the entertainment industry to collaborate on a universal ratings system that will make it easier for parents to discern the levels of sex and violence in all offerings.
But that will help only if parents use the tools they are given. The most startling revelation in the Kaiser report is that for a majority of kids there are no rules in the household about media use. Where there are rules, often they aren't enforced or they apply only to how many hours children watch TV, not to what they watch.
This is strange. For example, the author of the Kaiser study, Vicky Rideout, notes that in an earlier survey, two-thirds of parents reported that they are very concerned about children's exposure to sexual and violent media content and that half said they believe such exposure affects their children's behavior a lot.
So what explains the absence of rules and parental supervision? Perhaps it's the huge effort involved. Busy parents have to muster the energy to learn how to use V-chips, ratings systems and computer filtering. They have to make sure that the songs kids download are the "radio," or cleaned-up, versions. Monitoring and enforcing is a never-ending task.
Then again, maybe some parents are ambivalent about playing the role of censor. That's one theory of Gil Reavill, the author of "Smut: A Sex Industry Insider (And Concerned Father) Says Enough Is Enough." Mr. Reavill's compelling book--coming in April from Sentinel--charts the ways that children are bombarded by sexualized imagery and messages, most of which he recognizes as migrants into the mainstream from the porn industry. Although he sees this exposure as a form of sexual abuse, he is a libertarian who believes that the main control has to rest with the end-user who decides what gets into his house, or what doesn't.
But Mr. Reavill thinks many parents have bought into the prevailing argument that resistance amounts to a form of Big Brothering, which will put them into the camp of the uncool. "Parents are caught in an ideological bind," he says. "They're concerned about the content, but our society hasn't given them any kind of model in which they can do restraints without being censors."
For parents who want hand-holding, a clearer content-ratings system could help. Let's hope a call for industry cooperation from Sen. Clinton will go down easier than a similar one, directed at music, from Tipper Gore. Twenty years after the fact, Mr. Reavill observes, you can still play "Beat the Hell Out of Tipper Gore" on a Web site that lets visitors give Ms. Gore a black eye, broken teeth and a bloody nose.
