October 3, 2007

The Rant Corner
Good Luck Chuck and bad parenting

Stew Shearer | contributing columnist
sshearer@smcvt.edu

I went to the movies last weekend with my girlfriend and a friend of ours to see the movie Good Luck Chuck. The premise of the film is rather simple, whenever a woman sleeps with the title character, she immediately marries the next man she meets after breaking it off with him. Let the gratuitous sex scenes and rampant penguin jokes ensue!

However, I could not help but be distracted throughout the film by the 10-year-old boy sitting in the next row accompanied by what I presume was his mother (he did call her Mom several times, so I think it’s a safe guess). I will not say the woman lacked all common sense; she did cover up his eyes through numerous explicit sex scenes, but Good Luck Chuck is a flick that is as vulgar verbally as it is visually, and this boy should not have been anywhere near this theater.
           
Similarly, I was watching the TV show Supernanny over the summer and a mother on the show was allowing her extremely young daughter (around 3 or 4 years old if I remember correctly) to listen to an iPod filled to the brim with hip-hop and gangster rap. I should not have to describe the lyrics for you to understand that this was not appropriate music for this child to be listening to.
           
Walk into just about any video game store in America and eventually you will witness a parent with child in tow fork over a good sum of cash for a game with an M rating. Never mind that the clerk warned them about the game’s content, often graphically violent or sexual, and that the box clearly displays the big black M that signifies a Mature rating, ages 17 and older only. It’s just a game after all, right?
           
This is an attitude that I feel has become prevalent among many people. It’s just a game. It’s just a song. It’s just a movie. It’s just not intended for someone that young.

So why do so many parents seem not to care? On some level, I am willing to believe that it’s ignorance. This ignorance is two-fold. Some people don’t understand just how impressionable children really are.

Young kids believe the things they see and are told to believe in, to be real. A child who has no concept of what sex is or what real violence is, will learn from the things presented to him. As such, a young boy who has no experience with sex, and whose parents have likely not yet explained it to him will learn from what he sees; as anyone who has ever participated in the act will probably know, most cinematic sex is completely exaggerated and glorified.

A second side of this ignorance is not knowing what children are entertaining their time with. I spoke to St. Michael’s professor of psychology David Landers and he described one occasion where he was speaking to a group of parents and the subject turned to the popular video game Grand Theft Auto. He asked them how many of their children played it and many raised their hands. He then described some of things one could do in the game, including having sex with a prostitute and then killing her to get one’s money back. He proceeded to ask them if they were aware of this. Not a single person in the audience had known. I imagine that their expressions were amusing.
           
There has been so much controversy in the past concerning entertainment mediums that would never have existed if the parents involved in the outrage had merely paid attention to what their children were occupying themselves with. The controversy over music lyrics in the 1980s, the ever constant debate over violence in movies, television and video games are just a few examples. The cause of all of these controversies is the idea that children might use them and somehow be corrupted by what they are seeing and hearing. How did these kids get all of this stuff in the first place?
           
They received it the way any child comes to own anything, through their parents. If said parents would just stop being lazy and take 10 minutes to look at this stuff, then we would have no problem. With all of the resources on the Internet at our disposal, there is no excuse for a parent not to know the contents of their children’s entertainment. Many parents don’t take the time. Many are just too lazy and it’s a problem.
           
It is a problem. I play violent games, I watch gory movies and from time to time, I listen to a vulgar song, but I am an adult. I can take all of this stuff in context and already know the difference between right and wrong. A child doesn’t and what they watch, play or listen to can shape who they turn out to be. Obviously not every child who watches, plays, or listens to something inappropriate to his or her age will develop into a monstrous killing machine à la Columbine or Virginia Tech. It can affect them, and we as a society should be responsible enough to recognize good and bad parenting.