Staying Sane While Raising Your Teens

Monitoring What Your Kids Watch; Listen To…

February 9, 2013 at 12:54 pm Leave a comment

Is it Old Fashioned to Monitor What Your Kids watch on TV, listen to on the radio or watch at the movies?

I know the beats are cool and everybody is listening to the latest song or watching the latest video by Mr. or Ms. Sexy Rapper, but is that alright with you? We talk daily about how quickly our kids are growing up, what they are wearing and how many t(w)eens are sexually active. How do you think they got this way? It’s up to us to LIMIT what they are exposed to. One song comes to my mind by Li’l Wayne. I loved the beat, but the words were quite vulgar and even listening to the clean version meant you missed most of the words. Not a song that I wanted my kids to listen to, or to hear me listening to. When I had to hear it, I listened to it when no one was around.

According to an article I read the following statistics are true:

– Quick Facts Listening to degrading sexual lyrics has been shown to speed sexual activity (Pediatrics, 2006).
– Girls with a heavy sexual media diet engage in sexual activity younger than their peers (Harris Interactive, 2007).
– 68 percent of TV shows have explicit sexual content, but only 15% of that 68% discuss risk and responsibility (Harris Interactive, 2007).
– More than 40 percent of teens and preteens said they’d recently come across nudity and pornography on the internet (ForbesLife, 2007).

http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/news-general/20130205/csm.media.sex/?cid=hero_media

Listen to the songs, watch TV and the music videos with your kids. Discuss them. Are they too explicit? Are they too violent? Is there too much profanity in the lyrics? If so, you have my permission to turn it off and make it a teachable moment.  Your kids will surprise you later when they tell their friends that they shouldn’t listen to “that” song and explain why. Happy Parenting!

#Msparentguru

Entry filed under: family, Parenting, parenting teens, permissiveness, preteen, tweens. Tags: Arts, Harris Interactive, profanity, Radio edit, Sexual intercourse, Sexuality, sexually explicit, Sexy (Glee), Television program, TV limits, video limits.