Children Are Not Adults
Children are not miniature adults.
I begin with this reminder because it is apparent that many in our society have forgotten this fact. Children are incapable of making rational decisions, don’t know what is good for them, and have no concept of delayed gratification as they live in the never-ending “now”. As a parent I struggle with this fact on a daily basis – from explaining what a word means in terms my child understands to making sure he receives the proper nutrition to stay healthy.
For parents, that’s just common sense, right?
In my house, the Cartoon Network vies with Fox News and the Discovery Channel for dominance of the TV. Being a kid at heart, I enjoy cartoons and anime and find that most of the stuff around today is of much higher quality than the Hannah-Barbera stuff I grew up with in the late 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately the commercials are far worse though. During breaks between cartoons you will see ads in which adults – especially fathers – are portrayed as complete morons, with the kids sassing back with a witty – at least to a kid – remark. You’ll also see an advertisement for a CD of pop songs sung by children. Most pop songs are about love – and the CD mirrors that subject.
It’s just plain creepy to hear adolescents singing love songs originally sung by adults. I mean we are not talking girls in their late teens – but ten and eleven year olds pining away.
Similarly I attended The Kid’s school talent contest last week and saw a handful of all-girl acts sing and dance on stage. While the song choices were innocuous for the most part, I raised an eyebrow over way that some of the girls danced and the way they were semi-dressed. In a high school I would have thought that the suggestive dancing and dance costumes would be inappropriate, but we are talking about primary school – girls in the second and third grades.
Have I become a prude – or have some parents completely lost their minds?
It’s hard to say “no”. I struggle with this word myself – especially when facing an adversary like The Kid who is completely reliant upon me to provide him with everything. He will use any and every tactic to make me fulfill each and every whim that passes through his mind. He is a child and must manipulate; I am a parent and must control. This is a constant battle between two powerful forces yet the stakes are high: the raising of a creative, independent, intelligent human being.
Gil Reavil has written a book called ” Smut: A Sex-Industry Insider (and Concerned Father) Says Enough is Enough”. It is excerpted here at NRO. He writes:
“But we also have left unfulfilled our function as guardians of their cultural environment. The boundaries of their world have been repeatedly breached, many times by people interested in making money and dismissive of all other considerations. All too often, our children are exposed to the loud, frenzied, garish spectacle of adult sexuality. They get their faces rubbed in it.”
Consumption lies at the heart of our society – not sexual liberation. The only reason why sex pervades our culture is because it sells. If prayer moved product you could bet that our TVs would be filled chanting monks and bowed heads, but it doesn’t. Britney Spears doesn’t bump and grind on stage for fun – she does it for cold hard cash. Take that away and she would disappear.
Instead of falling into the liberal trap of debating morality, let’s talk about the underlying reason for our society’s obsession with sex: pure commerce. People get rich by appealing to our basest instinct, yet this doesn’t bother Leftists at all. It must be the only means of getting rich that the Left supports.
Republicans and the Right aren’t blameless either. The Right has played into the hands of liberals by falling for the morality-trap, and the laissez-faire pro-business supporters of Republicans must recognize that their “hands off” idealism supports this unique sales tool. As Dean Esmay has often said, corporations are not “natural” – they are contrivances of the state. Republicans need to recognize that corporations are amoral and need to be controlled to a great degree. We wouldn’t allow a company to sell products to Iran, yet we allow thousands of them to pitch products using sex. Both are threats to our national interests.
Raising children has never been easy, but we chose to be parents. We owe it to our children to make sure that we provide for them, protect them and fight for them at all times. While we may tire, we must never, ever surrender.
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