Across the board—and especially among the professional middle class—parents view television, movies, and, more recently, the Internet as the primary, uncontrollable sources of threat to innocence. These parents thus sound much like the cultural critic Neil Postman in tying the “disappearance of childhood” to the introduction of these forms of mass media.13
Consider the answer that Dave Townsend gave when asked what he believes to be his biggest problem raising children today. A white attorney from Louisville, Kentucky, and the father of three teenage daughters, Dave focused on what he perceives to be images of sex in the media; he also tacked on th e issue of violence:14
I keep saying, oh, because I have girls, I think one of the big issues these days is the increasing emphasis on sex at earlier and earlier ages. These girls get exposed to things that I never got exposed to when I was a kid—probably would have been happier as a kid if I had—but they see things on TV that I couldn’t have imagined or in the movies. You know, the PG-13 movies are like the R’s or maybe the X’s, assuming we had R’s and X’s when I was a kid—I don’t think we did. They just get exposed to a lot more in the way of sexual references than I ever did. I don’t know. I guess that there are a lot more violence kind of things that they get exposed to.
Note that Dave believes that he is particularly concerned about this issue because he has girls, suggesting that the moral purity of his daughters is of special significance to him. Indeed, Dave indicates that as a boy, he might have been “happier” if he had seen some of those sexy scenes on television. Even so, he wants to protect his daughters from them.
The recently widowed father of a fourteen-year-old girl, Jeff Wright, an educator in Connecticut, expressed similar concerns. On the one hand, like Dave, Jeff recognizes that there might be individuals for whom the shift to greater openness is a positive influence; on the other hand, he has a conservative, moral anxiety about whether this openness has gone too far. And this anxiety is directed at the purity and innocence of his daughter. Like Dave as well, Jeff referred to what he believes are the changing standards of regulations concerning the content of PG-13- and R-rated movies. Jeff also worries about his capacity to maintain his own values—and to pass them on to his daughter—in the face of a culture that he believes undermines what he holds dear:
So she’s part of a society now that’s benefitting from the openness, that’s benefitting from the more open dialogue that goes on. But at the same time, because of the coarsening of our lifestyle, the movies that she can see today that are PG-13 would have been R when I was growing up, in terms of violence, in terms of sexual content, and attitude. . . . There had to be a loosening of a lot of the restrictions and judgments that were made in our society, and I’m glad that has happened to a degree, and there’s more that needs to be done. But at the same time, there’s been a loosening of our expectations about how people behave and treat one another and even treat themselves. You know, a Paris Hilton is a perfect example: the woman became a celebrity because of a sex tape and is now some sort of cultural icon that we have her on the cover of the New York Times, for no other reason than for the fact that she is a celebrity and not even—you can’t even call her a role model. How do parents create a value system that can stand up against that kind of coarseness and obnoxiousness and cheapening, especially in terms of self-worth and self-respect?
Mothers share these concerns. Marcia Caldwell, who lives in rural Pennsylvania, also spoke about Paris Hilton as an example of the kind of influence from which she would have liked to protect her daughter. While she acknowledges that her children might need to learn about other ongoing events—the war in Iraq, the space shuttle, ethnic violence in Africa—she wants to shield her child from the immediacy of threats and from “sensationalism”: [3]
While parents are especially concerned with images of sex and violence, which they believe hasten “maturity,” they are also concerned, more generally, that there is no escape for children into what the parents deem to be a more “normal” innocence. One mother talked about 9/11 and how the events of that day were shown on television even though, she believes, it was not appropriate for young children to see those images. In her rendition, networks showed those images specifically to children: “It shows stuff the kids don’t even need to know at certain ages, like when 9/11 happened. . . . Just that they immediately showed it to the kids at way too young an age, and I thought it was inappropriate.”15 And another woman, Susan Chase, the white mother of two who works as an attorney in northern California, more generally worries about the cultural influences impinging on adolescents: “I do think that our culture really is pretty toxic, and I think that’s really too bad, that they live in a culture—that part of our job as parents now, along with all of the other jobs, is to protect our children from their own culture. And so that’s certainly a problem.”
As these comments suggest, parents are particularly anxious because they believe they are losing control over the environments in which their children are raised; they believe that environments constructed by the media and technology are beyond their sphere of influence. And they view this as a significant social change: as one middle-class mother of three children said, her parents “had more control” because they “didn’t have twenty-four-hour TV.”
For some parents, not fully understanding the technology that so seduces their children—the instant messaging, the texting—constitutes an additional source of anxiety. Parents believe that they cannot control what they haven’t mastered themselves. Tom Audet is a college professor in northern California. Even though the demands of his job require him to remain technologically adept, he believes his two teenage children are far more sophisticated than he is with respect to recent developments. When asked what he sees as the greatest problem, he spoke about the technology gap:
We finally raised a generation of children that are ahead of us in terms of the technology that’s available. . . . Children [are] the cutting edge, and the parents [are] scrambling to catch up and maybe never catch up. That’s certainly true for me. There’s younger parents who also mastered this technology, but kids are way ahead of their parents most of the time.
The concern with the media and technology, most extreme among the elite parents, generated different responses among parents in different social classes. As is discussed in chapter 6, middle-class and working-class parents are more interested in devices that constrain children: these parents want to ensure that their offspring do not wander onto websites of which they do not approve, and they are interested in putting blocks on programs and channels on their television. However, these concerns do not lead the more privileged parents to impose similar limits. Nor do these concerns lead these parents to ban televisions from their homes or prohibit their children from having cell phones and laptop computers. To the contrary: the elite parents actively purchase these material goods (even though they worry about a materialistic culture). But they also act in ways to assess their childrens readiness for different influences and to ensure that their values are inculcated along with the values that they believe the media is projecting. Hence, parents talk about the necessity for discussion with their children and for remaining attentive to the influences that come from outside the home. Through this discussion and attentiveness they aim to intervene in, to mediate, and occasionally to counteract the effects of influences that would make their children “mature too fast.” Ironically, these discussions themselves often assume considerable intellectual maturity on the part of children. Indeed, professional middle-class parents express great pride in how sophisticated these discussions turn out to be.