parents...

A friend of mine, xerocube, posted in his blog about the "hot coffee" mod for Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and how it highlights how many parents in this country pay no attention to what their kids are using. You can find his article here:
http://xerocube.blogspot.com/2005/07/just-thought.html

I completely agree with him, and I think that not enough parents pay attention to what thier kids are playing, watching, and listening to. I will go one further and say that ratings systems and censorship by the FCC are quite possibly making this situation worse. Because the government slaps an E rating on a game, alot of moms think that it's okay for thier spawnlings to play it. There are plenty of games that are rated E that I would not find appropriate for children under the age of 15 or so because of one or two certain things. For example, Many of the DDR games are rated E. In general, DDR is a pretty innocuous concept, and most of the songs are fine for family consumption. However, some of the DDR games include songs with very specific sexual content, such as "oh nick please not so quick" and "blow my whistle".

This just goes to show that you should ALWAYS always pay attention to what your kids are into. That way, they hopefully don't get into anything unwholsesome, and if they do, you can talk to them about what they saw/heard. Kids want parents who are there for them in every way, Including setting limits. While they may whine and tell you how suzie's mom lets her watch the movie/play the game/listen to the album, they crave discipline. If you are fair and consistent in other matters, they will come to understand that you have a good reason for limits on TV, games, movies, music, etc, even if they don't "like" it.

In addition to the ratings system making parents feel "comfortable" when they should not, I think that censoring content and saying that it is then "okay" for kids is also doing nothing but making parents comfortable. All censoring words does is take one word out of the middle of something that's generally completely innapropriate for children to hear. For example: " I wanna _____ you like an animal/ I wanna feel you from the inside" ends up being just as adult as "I wanna fuck you like an animal/I wanna feel you from the inside" because of the context. This is the case with most songs with "curse words."

Songs and movies use adult words because they're about adult subjects. Children do not need to hear adult things all day every day, which is what ends up happening when we censor certain words and do not pay attention to context. I think that we should do away with censorship of words in songs on TV, etc.. However, I think that there should be a concerted effort to make truly "family appropriate", movies, TV, and music. What I would love is for me to be able to turn on the radio and hear whatever filthy song I want to hear, AND for Suzie Soccermom to be able to turn on the radio and hot have to worry that her children are going to get an education in human sexuality or guns or drugs. I would be willing to support the Government taking some of the money away from the FCC to put it towards incentives for people who develop truly family appropriate media.