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Re-valu-ing
the Family, Part Fourteen: Culprits' and Their Characteristics (Continued)
by
Richard and Linda Eyre
(www.valuesparenting.com)
This
week we will take a closer look at the "family damage" that is done
by entertainment and media institutions, information and communication
institutions, and political and governmental institutions.
Note: In this
twenty-six part column, Richard and Linda Eyre explore the recent
revolution of the family from the honored centerpiece of society
to a disrespected and seemingly redundant appendage to the larger
corporate and cultural institutions of our new world. Re-valu-ing
the family, the Eyres believe, is the only alternative to America's
demise. The sequence of the column is: A. Re-valu-ing the family
(part I); B. The "crux" (parts 2 and 3 -- why family is the foundation
for everything, including happiness); C. The "curse" (parts 4 and
5 -- the social problems that plague our society today); D. The
"crisis" (parts 6 and 7 -- the breakdown and breakup of families
that allows and leads to the social problems); E. The "cause" (parts
8, 9, 10, 11 -- the reasons our families are failing); F. The "culprits"
(parts 12, 13, 14, and 15-- how our new, large institutions are
destroying the small, most basic institution of family); G. The
"cure" (parts 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22 -- what you as a parent
can do about it); H. The "case" (parts 23, 24, and 25 -- a case
for government and big corporations to pay more positive attention),
and I. Finding or forming a family support group (part 26).
4. Entertainment
and Media Institutions
Entertainment
has existed as long as people have, and the messages of song and
dance, of theater, of the visual arts, and even of sports have always
been varied and diverse -- some of them derogatory or dangerous
to the family. Various ways of reporting on events or "news" have
also existed forever.
But it is only
recently that entertainment and news have combined with electronic
media technology and become an institution so vast, so powerful,
and so centralized that its messages could threaten and undermine
families and the values that sustain families on a wide, even global
scale.
On the positive
side, entertainment media, from movies to TV to music, brings families
together, gives them a shared experience, helps them communicate
and can at times uplift and even inspire them. And news media keeps
us informed and up-to-date like never before.
Yet at the
same time, our media today is so pervasive and so addictive that
it takes time away from families and substitutes for communication
within families even as it douses us with content that desensitizes
us to violence, to dangerous, casual sex, and to other destroyers
of family.
When soap operas
(or sit-coms) portray promiscuous teenage sex as the norm, it becomes
the norm. When movies or TV dramas portray indiscriminate violence
as commonplace, it becomes commonplace. When rap songs portray hatred
and bizarre acts as the thing to feel and the things to do, they
become exactly that for millions. When news covers only the sensational
or the violent, we think that's how the world is. And when irresponsible
or valueless behavior is presented without any reference or connection
to consequences, young people (and older ones, too, for
that matter) begin to believe they can get away with anything.
In a television
debate on who should take responsibility for a horrendous high school
murder and suicide tragedy, a producer/director-type was insisting
that it was unfair to blame media. Where then, questioned his opponent,
did the shooters get their graphic images of dark gun violence,
spurting blood, and exploding bodies. Did they get those images
from their parents? From their school? From their church?
We know how
susceptible the human mind is, especially the young mind
is to visual and audio suggestion. It's why companies are willing
to pay a million dollars for a thirty-second impression during the
Super Bowl. Yet we continue to allow violent, anti-social images
to flow at our children several times a day.
Teen pregnancy
and sexually transmitted diseases are at epidemic proportions as
our kids watch nightly sitcoms where people jump into bed on the
first date and sex is generally treated as a form of recreation.
Routine divorce, single parenting, and various alternative life
styles get far more play than stable marriages and families. So
much so that someone really committed to his marriage and family
might tune in for an evening of standard fare TV and conclude that
he was a dinosaur -- hopelessly old-fashioned and out of touch.
Daytime TV
talk shows, in their quest for ratings, compete against each other
in terms of which can find and present the most irresponsible and
bizarre behavior. In the process they "lower the bar" in terms of
what is acceptable and undermine the values and behavior that is
necessary to preserve and protect families.
We used to
look through our rectangular glass windows and see our neighbors
and feel connected to them and share their same values. We still
do that today but our rectangular glass windows turn on and off
with a switch and our view is of a made-up fictional kind of neighbors
whose behavior carries no consequence, who get their problems resolved
by the end of the half hour, who seem to effortlessly have everything
we want without paying for it, and who make us think we're old-fashioned
because we don't live or think like they do.
It's not only
the entertainment media that sucks away our time and influences
our values, it's the news media as well. "Staying informed" takes
up big chunks of our day, and, far from being "values neutral,"
much of the data that reaches us is slanted or "spun" to make most
everything else seem more important than family.
Never before
have we been so in touch, so well-informed, so up-to-date on so
much of what is going on in the world. But, in addition to not being
very practically useful, much of the information of our informative
age is anti-family in various ways.
It is a generally
accepted fact that the press and news media, taken in aggregate,
is more liberal in both its ideology and its life style, than the
average American. And the most visible conservatives in the media
are often so strident and self-righteous in their style that they
become hard to identify with. Thus anti-family life styles are treated
as legitimate life style alternatives and traditional, measurably
functional families are portrayed as outdated, old-fashioned, or
more and more often, as nonexistent.
Even the "reputable"
news shows seem compelled to go for what shocks us rather than for
what helps us.
A personal
example: "20/20" called us to ask if we'd help them with a show
on values. We were excited to do so in light of some work we were
doing with inner city kids based on our Teaching Your Children Values
book. They came and filmed for two days and got some very touching
footage of disadvantaged kids who were really turning their lives
around by understanding and implementing values. In one particular
segment on having the courage to stand up for what you believe,
a beautiful but victimized eight-year-old was responding to "scenarios"
in a color coded teaching game. "Someone offers you drugs;" Yellow
-- "You take them;" Orange -- "You say no;" Red -- "You turn in
the kid that offered them." None of the scenarios were hypothetical
to this little girl -- she'd faced them all. At the end of the game,
I asked her what she thought she was -- yellow, orange, or red.
With a tear in her eye she said, "I've been mostly yellow, but I'm
trying to hang out with more reds so I think I'm kind of orange
now." It was a beautiful, positive moment -- and the film crew recorded
dozens more like it. But when the show was produced and aired, the
upbeat, hopeful stuff was all cut. They used footage of hard, defiant
kids who made shocking statements about their lack of values. Completely
unbalanced, the show implied that all kids are basically monsters.
Why is disproportionate
news coverage given to violence and cruelty? Why do magazine shows
and news features seem almost as preoccupied with deviance and dysfunctionality
as are the talk shows? The answer, of course, has to do with profit.
News ratings, just like entertainment ratings, go up in proportion
to sex and violence.
The omni-presence
of news and entertainment media brings things into our homes that
have never been admitted before . . . violence on the evening news,
pornography on cable, divorce statistics that are skewed to make
it appear that no marriage survives, celebrities who are negative
role models for our children, and a general impression that people
with money and power are the ones to emulate, not the people with
families.
One part of
parenting that has always been assumed, if not guaranteed, is the
responsibility and the opportunity of deciding what children
should learn or be exposed to or become familiar with . . . when
they should receive it . . . and how they should view it
or prioritize it or think about it. Parents, in other words, were
essentially in charge of how their children would initially see
the world. They were thus able to mold and shape children's paradigms
and early values, giving them a foundation on which to build their
own beliefs and perspectives, their own lives.
The massive
news and information institutions of today have seized that function
-- snatched it away from parents by their very pervasiveness. Short
of living somewhere on a primitive island, families have no way
of shielding children or screening what they see and hear.
5. Information
and Communication Institutions
A generation
ago, parents complained about TV -- what was on it and how much
time it took. But the TV was usually in the living room and it was
possible to sit down with the kids and watch it. Today,
the Internet poses a far more difficult challenge. Kids can go online
from almost anywhere -- and get far more raw and explicit sex and
violence. And much of what they can find is interactive and thus
far more involving and influential. And if kids want to interact
with their voice rather than a keyboard and with a live person rather
than images on a screen, they can call one of the 900 numbers they
see advertized everywhere.
Few would want
to do without the marvels of our information age. Our data and communication
systems serve us magnificently. They keep us in touch, with each
other and with the world. They put limitless information and knowledge
at our fingertips. They tend to increase our tolerance and understanding
-- to break down barriers of ignorance and prejudice. Communication
and information institutions -- from huge ----- utilities to Internet
companies to computer networks and systems -- literally make the
world work; and they make our own individual worlds so much bigger.
Nevertheless,
these institutions are definite culprits in the destruction of our
families. Their methods of destruction range from the benign to
the malignant -- from the domination and consumption of our time
to the intentional pollution and perversion of our children's perspectives,
morality, and standards. It's a question both of how much interaction
and family time a child is missing by spending five hours a day
in front of a monitor and a keyboard or on the phone . . . and it
is a question of how much filth he is ingesting from these sources.
If a parental
vote could be taken, it's likely that the Internet would win out
as the most feared large institution of all. With a few strokes
on a keyboard -- something as simple as entering the most violent
and sexual words they know -- kids can be in direct (and interactive)
touch with hard-core pornography, with violent blood-gushing "games,"
with on-line pedophiles, or with detailed instructions for how to
construct a bomb. What they can get verbally over the phone lines
by simply dialing a 900 number is almost as bad.
6. Public/Political
Institutions
As acknowledged,
there have always been governments -- from tribal councils to despot
kings, and they have always had the power and potential to be destructive
to family life. But it is only in the last several decades that
the public sector, our governmental structures, have become big
enough and institutionalized enough to systematically take over
many of the functions of families and to monitor and tax families
to the extent of threatening their viability.
The size of
government today, and its scope of "services" taxes families to
the point of threatening their economic survival, and then it makes
families seem redundant by attempting to supply, via its larger
institutions, the services, the welfare, the child and elderly care
and a host of other elements that families used to provide for themselves.
Remember that
on our diagram, the public sector is the outer ring, existing
for the express purpose of protecting the freedom and autonomy
of the institutions inside (the family, the private sector, and
the voluntary or non-profit sector).
Unfortunately,
government on virtually every level, has strayed from and gone beyond
that ideal, passing and implementing all kinds of obtrusive and
intrusive tax and regulatory laws that undermine the inner sectors
in numerous ways and that particularly threaten the bull's eye of
the family. Legislative and judicial branches of federal and state
governments (the courts are included with "legal institutions" under
number 8) often in well-intentioned efforts to protect individual
rights, have failed to consider family rights or parental responsibilities.
"Protect" is
the operative word, and the concept around which debate must center.
The goal must be to protect individual rights without jeopardizing
families. A tax law that makes married individuals pay more
than they would if they were single does not pass that test. Nor
do laws that make it easier (and cheaper) to find day care for a
newborn than to have maternity leave and nurture the child. Nor
do laws that are so overzealous in protecting children that they
undermine a parent's right to discipline a child, or to take him
to church, or to make decisions about his education.
Our elected
governments, like every large institutions-culprit we've identified,
gravitate to their own survival and expansion and in the process
overwhelm families even as they fail to protect them.
Next
week: Conclusions of the culprits -- focusing on education institutions,
courts and legal institutions, community, recreation, and social/cultural
institutions, and religious, psychological, and self-help institutions.
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© 2001 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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