One Mom's Media Experiences
These examples of media influence are typical of what parents and guardians face today.
Articles within this series
- Overview
- The Entertainment Elephant
- How Entertainment Can Influence Thoughts and Actions
- Little Squeaks Can Mean Big Problems
- Media Violence Study
- Teaching Kids to Kill
- Explaining the Music-Memory Connection
- Fiction and Females: The Pitfalls of Chick Lit
- One Mom's Media Experiences
- How to Combat Media's Influence in Your Home
- Next Steps / Related Information
A Bad Case of the Gimmees
Understanding the media’s influence on children and deciding how to handle it is critical for parents today. If your children are still pretty young, you may not have given it much thought yet.
That awareness dawned in our home when our first child, Michele, was 4 years old. Until then, her media consumption had been limited to a steady diet of PBS’s Sesame Street with a small helping of Disney videos. Background music, if any, consisted of “Wee Sing Praise” or “Animal Alphabet.”
Then it happened.
For some reason, maybe during a PBS fund-raising drive, I switched the TV to network cartoons. Within hours, this normally happy, content little girl was demanding sweet cereals I’d never heard of and building a mile-long Christmas wish list.
Our family was rudely awakened to the power of commercials.
Song Lyrics and Musical Midriffs
While I was driving in the car with my teen daughter, the radio was tuned to her favorite station. I was jarred by lyrics that seemed to suggest suicide.
I asked her what she thought the artist was saying, and she replied that he felt he was nearing death, but not contemplating suicide. A lively discussion entailed that would not have come up in natural conversation.
On the other hand, I came home later that week to find my 10-year-old playing rock star with her friend, and the boom box blasting, “I’m your candy man.” At first, red flags went up. But I quickly realized she was dancing happily to visions of sugar plums (more likely, Reese’s Pieces) and let it go.
Music’s influence goes far beyond its words. Kids do play rock star with less-than-innocent outcomes. A parent doesn’t need to go any further than the local high school hallways to find the effect that pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilara have had on styles — much to the chagrin of principals everywhere. Even the once-conservative Sears sported the bare-midriff look on its 2001 back-to-school sales flyer.
Playing dress-code cop to a daughter is the easy part; how do you safeguard your son from the classroom “visuals”?