“Parental Guidance is advised.” This is a phrase that has been widely used for decades to prevent youth from being exposed to things that are simply inappropriate for them. The phrase implies a trust in the parental figure to use discretion and censorship when guiding their under-aged children through a media crazed world.
Indeed, the Motion Picture Association of America (the mastermind behind the now international rating system) explains that the system, created in 1968, was implemented to, “create a new and, at the time, revolutionary approach to fulfilling the movie industry’s self prescribed obligation to the parents of America,” (www.mpaa.org).
Though this concept is not new, it seems parents must increasingly be more aware of their responsibilities as guardians to their children. Long ago were the days where the most racy show parents tried to conceal from their children was Charlie’s Angels. The show, which is now considered tame is as tame gets, raised a lot of eyebrows when it first hit the airwaves in September of 1976. Nowadays, we are lucky if we can walk down the street without seeing a woman in lingerie on the billboards, watch television without seeing images of incredible violence, or listen to music without hearing messages encouraging the constant degredation of women.
Thankfully, we have the ever constant guidance and supervision of the parent… or so we thought. Just when we thought the family home was the one safe haven in this world, it seems those ideals of the protective parent have started to deteriorate.
Annett and Landon Pharris, small-town parents of 3 under-aged children broke headlines in 2005 for hiring a stripper named Sassy for their eldest son’s sixteenth birthday party. As Sassy began to disrobe and gyrate her body into the minors’ faces, the previously “responsible” parents did nothing to contest the situation, and Annett and Landon Pharris were arrested.
But this is not the first time a story like this has surfaced in the last decade: In 1999, A San Francisco bay area woman was convicted and sentenced because she did not object when her 15-year-old daughter hired a male stripper to perform at the daughter’s Halloween Party.
Both these scenarios involve parents overstepping the boundaries of what is appropriate. Not only did the parents not censor their children’s exposure to the explicitly inappropriate situation, but they in fact encouraged the same messages that they are meant to protect their children from.
The concept is hard to swallow, but it appears that as the boundaries of the media dwindle, it is not just the children that are losing sight of their values. Parents are falling into the oversexualized media hype just the same as the rest.
But wait; if this is the case, then who is protecting the sanctity of innocence, of tradition, of morals? The truth? If we don’t do something to stop the hold the media has taken on our society, then nobody is. Parents must take a hold of their duty and their right to protect their youth from the grips of the new, undeniably corrupt media culture.
