Kids' Risky TV Habits

(The American Prospect)  This column from The American Prospect was written by Greg Anrig.

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A Wall Street Journal op-ed last week headlined "Why The Democrats Are Losing The Culture Wars" by Dan Gerstein, the former communications director for Senator Joe Lieberman, set the progressive blogosphere abuzz over the extent to which liberals should express concern about the impact on children of the entertainment industry's output. Ed Kilgore, Amy Sullivan, and Matthew Yglesias seemed to reach something of a consensus in agreeing that kids are indeed exposed to lots of media garbage that can't be good for them, and may be bad in a variety of ways. Kilgore laid out the most specific plan of action, arguing that progressive leaders should voice their displeasure with the nature of much media content, push for more research into how children are affected, and explore mechanisms like ratings systems that would help to guide concerned parents.

All of that will probably be useful in improving the favorability ratings of liberals, though it's hard to say how much. But going beyond earning brownie points to making actual progress in addressing this genuine problem in American society will require grappling with a politically precarious reality: Most parents are enablers for the entertainment industry and advertisers in serving mind-altering electronic cocktails to their children.

Across the income spectrum, parents and caregivers use television as a cheap babysitter. Kaiser Family Foundation surveys show that 68 percent of children 8 and older have a TV in their bedroom, as do 36 percent of children 6 and under. Presumably, that privacy enables those kids to surf, without supervision, from soaps to MTV to Jerry Springer to the FOX prime-time lineup to whatever else they find to be stimulating enough to stop and soak in. The average American child between 8 and 18 spends more than three hours a day watching TV -- more than twice that after adding other electronic media like CD players, videos, computers, etc. -- compared with 43 minutes reading.

The same Kaiser surveys show that parents worry about what their kids are absorbing. Sixty-three percent say they are "very concerned" that children are being exposed to too much inappropriate content in entertainment media, and another 26 percent are "somewhat concerned." Television is decisively considered to be the media source of greatest concern, and sexual content runs slightly ahead of violence as a cause of worry. Yet the latest Kaiser report states, "Despite concerns that parents often express about the impact of media on their children, as well as about the sheer number of hours kids seem to spend with media, the kids themselves do not report much parental effort to monitor or curb their media consumption."

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