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Published Monday, March 28, 2005
Parents' Dilemma -- Keeping Kids From Sex on TV

By MIKE DUFFY
Detroit Free Press

Television can easily get on a parent's last nerve whenever kids want to watch the darndest, most inappropriate things.

But in the 21st-century world, where children's consumption of all forms of media -- from television to video games to the Internet -- has been growing rapidly, parents face an especially difficult challenge.

Monitoring kids' TV viewing is much tougher today than it was in the now long-ago days of three networks, limited choices and mostly G-rated programming.

Mom Tracy Dreslinski of Rochester Hills, Mich., is a real-life case study. It was 15-year-old daughter Katie's fascination with "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" that really rang the chimes of her parental concern.

"That's the one where we said, `Let's yank the cable,' " Dreslinski recalls. "Katie was always sneaking downstairs to watch `SVU,' " the grim adult crime drama that focuses on violent sexual-assault cases. So out went the cable hookup to Tracy and Scott Dreslinski's basement television.

Now, the family's only cableconnected television is the one with a 32-inch screen in the family room. And that one's connected to a digital video recorder (DVR) so the family -- which includes Katie, 11-year-old Emily and 4-year-old Ben -- can avoid commercials and watch favorite shows on their own schedule.

"Our household rule is that the kids can only watch TV when they're watching with me, unless it's a tape of one of our `approved' programs," says Dreslinski, 44, a self-employed technology consultant and Web designer.

The programs on her list of mom-approved shows that she and her daughters usually watch together include the family-oriented dramas "Joan of Arcadia," "Jack & Bobby" and "7th Heaven," as well as family sitcoms such as "8 Simple Rules" and the warmhearted reality show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition."

"There's so much terrible stuff on TV today, it's scary," Dreslinski says. "So we set out to limit the amount of time they watch. If we watch together, it doesn't count against their own TV time, which is supposed to be one hour a day. But they probably watch more, especially after school. I'm not a Nazi about it."

A new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18- year-olds," is especially sobering. The national survey of the media-consumption habits of 2,000 third-through-12th graders reveals that "the total amount of media content young people are exposed to each day has increased more than an hour (from 7 hours, 29 minutes to 8 hours, 33 minutes) over the past five years."

While most of the increase comes from the use of video games and computers, television -- the mass entertainment medium once labeled the `plug-in drug' -- still occupies plenty of children's daily attention. And 53 percent of the young people surveyed for the study said their families "have no rules about watching TV." Of the 46 percent who indicated their parents do have TV rules, just 20 percent said the rules are enforced "most" of the time.

But rules do work, the study suggests. Children living in homes where TV rules are enforced have "two hours less daily media exposure than those from homes without rules."

Of course, different families have different standards for what is acceptable.

Ratings showed that many found no problem with "Friends," for instance. That was a huge hit that frequently featured sexually-laced comic banter. The show became a magnet for many viewers as young as 10. And there's been an explosion of reality TV series in recent years, including occasionally raunchy, taste-challenged network shows like "Big Brother," "Fear Factor" and "The Simple Life," which sometimes target and attract school-age viewers.

"The thing with entertainment is that it's like the environment," Watson says. "A lot of it is cultural pollution. So to say, as some do, that `If you don't like it, change the channel,' is like saying, `If you don't like air pollution, just stop breathing.' "

But American popular culture -- be it TV shows, movies, music, comic books or video games -- can be simultaneously thrilling to one person and offensively exasperating to another. And to some, who believe in the wide-open American notion of exuberantly free expression and creativity, saying "If you don't like it, change the channel," sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea.