n November 3, 2008, as voters in the United States held their breath for the outcome of the Obama-McCain election, an entirely unrelated story made headlines in the evening news. A study conducted by staff of the RAND Corporation and published in Pediatrics reported that a rise in teenage pregnancy could be attributed to the amount of sex teens viewed on television.1 Parents were urged both to restrict the frequency and type of programs their children watched alone and, as much as possible, to watch television with their children. Had they been listening to Katie Couric’s review of these findings on the television in my living room, the parents with whom I had spoken the year before would have nudged me with perverse satisfaction: “See, we were right: there is reason to be concerned.”
Indeed, many of the interviewed parents, across the socioeconomic spectrum, expressed an intense anxiety about highly sexualized media images and ready access to pornography on the Internet. Among many parents, such concerns are conjoined almost reflexively with worries about images of violence, as if the parents perceived no difference in the impact of the two. Many parents also make little distinction between the violent images of fiction and those that depict current events. Nor do they distinguish between sensationalism about a contemporary figure such as Paris Hilton and equally “sensational” stories about global warming. All of this is combined in the minds of parents who worry that the world is too much with their children and that their children are being compelled to grow up too fast. These concerns are most prominent among the professional middle — class parents, even if, in one form or another, they extend throughout the range of the interviewed parents (as was the case with the sense of isolation). In this sentiment, the respondents in this study are in line with the vast majority of American parents, two-thirds of whom are “very concerned about the amount of inappropriate media content children in this country are exposed to.”2