A man knocks on your door. As soon as you answer, you recognize him from the posters around town. He’s a known thief and sexual predator of young girls who has just escaped from prison. He asks if he can go into your teens’ bedroom to hang out with them for a while. Of course you say, “No way!” so he asks if he can just come into your living room and hang out. You say, “Absolutely not!” So he finally just settles for hanging out with the whole family as you watch a litany of popular TV shows that night; as you spend “family time” together.
If we, under any circumstances, wouldn’t let that man into the rooms of our kids (whether male of female) why would we let a TV or computer reside in our kids’ bedrooms? These modern occupiers of time dispense a river of polluted entertainment riddled with the same values driving the visitor at your front door. Why would you let all those people into your house? Every time we let unsupervised media into our homes and into our kids’ minds, we have invited a terrorist into our home.
You may be surprised at how many “terrorists” there are in your home right now. Video games, computers, cell phones, teen magazines, music, TV, & movies: all of which fall under the umbrella of entertainment and all are likely perpetrators. But in particular, entertainment in the form of movies, television and music is what is shaping our young generation. Although we consider them entertainment, they are actually infotainment. They impart values and information about the world, maybe information about life, that your kids are not ready to process and absorb. The problem is that too many parents use these avenues to keep their kids occupied, allowing them to witness just a part of the “unavoidable” culture in which we live. For example, television, broadcasts some 20,000 sex scenes that the average young person will view by the time he or she graduates from high school!