Just for the record, since any parent who doesn't agree with you is weak and lazy, exactly what age should children stop being children and start being young adults? At exactly what age are they allowed to make some choices in their own entertainment? Twenty? Thirty? Or maybe take the easy way out and agree with the government: eighteen. Well, that's not entirely acurate, now is it? Because so many eighteen-year-olds believed it was unfair that they were legally adults and not allowed to drink by law until age twenty-one, most state governments amended the legal age of adulthood to twenty-one, rather than lower the drinking age.
Anyone else think that twenty is pretty old to still be considered a child?
But who says that when you're twenty, you're mature. Or twenty-one, or even thirty. I know a handful of immature men banking towards forty, and it wasn't television that made them that way, ladies and gentlemen. There is absolutely nothing in this society that we will ever be mature enough to accept because we are all individuals and respond differently. Some children at age twelve discuss world politics and know more than their parents(although their parents, no doubt, still think knowing more in some areas means they know everything); some kids at thirteen have already lost their virginity and learned everything they know about sex and relationships from their parents. I knew a girl whose mother gave her stacks of PlayGirl magazine at an early age and whose family, mother, father, and the two daughters used to all go swimming naked together; innocent, maybe, but I neglected to mention that this girl had been performing sexual acts since sixth grade. Her parents were not weak and lazy, they were bad parents, but they weren't weak and lazy.
A bad parent is one who doesn't know the maturity or the intelligence level of their own child. Twelve-year-olds are not by any means mature on the average. But they are intelligent, and it's at this crucial stage in development that they need more information, not less. Personally, I think they should be reading books instead of watching television, but society is what we'd made of it, and television is not going away.
Yes, this is my "since television isn't going away, let's not burn all of the TV sets down" philosophy, similar to my "Kids are going to do whatever they want, so why not either help them--not to be confused with force them--make the correct decisions, or help them learn from their mistakes. There's a man I know who's in his fifties now. When he was in school and still living with his parents, he went to a party one night and got so drunk he was throwing up everywhere and couldn't get to his room under his own power. His mother wanted to help him, but his father wouldn't allow it. He left him there to sleep on the floor in his own vomit. The next day, there were no lectures, but this acquaintance of mine had to clean up the mess he'd made, and subsequently, he never drank again.
I consider that good parenting in spite of what anyone else might think, and I'm sure that it was a hell of a lot more controversial than letting a 12-year-old boy watch South Park. Maybe there are things kids shouldn't know, but the fact is that they're going to have to do a better job by their kids than we do by ours, and if we start censoring the real world from them, they are going to grow up to be as ignorant as us, maybe worse.
South Park is a show. Adults watch it. Children watch it. These are facts that we can't get around, maybe because parents are too weak to watch after their kids, maybe because kids are too weak to watch after their parents--whatever. Facts are facts and opinions are opinions.
Here are my South Park opinions:
The show is for audiences mature and intelligent enough to understand all of its nuances and to not be offended by them, that goes for adults as well as their children. If a random adult turns it on and turns it off because the phrase, "Shut up, ass-master!" is offensive to them, then they have made the right decision. South Park is not for those with thin skin or narrow minds. Those that do not understand should not watch the show. But young adult(12+) are far more tolerant to filthy language and different ideas because they don't have the benefit/curse of years of experience weighing them down, so whether they understand it or not, they may not turn it off. Good parents who have a relationship with their kids know the boundaries of their understanding. If they know that their kids are laughing at the fart jokes and missing the show's redeeming social commentary, they should take command and turn it off. But if the parent knows their kid understands the more obscure sexual references already and the social jokes that point out truthes all too real, and they want to turn it off because they think somehow that will erase the knowledge from their son or daughter's mind, the only thing that parent should do is to see a therapist because their reality is impaired.
If a child already has the information and the understanding, it's up to the parent to make sure they use it correctly. If the child has the information but not the understanding, it's up to the parent to make sure they understand.
If the parent has the information and the child has the understanding, it's up to the parent to keep their ignorance out of their child's education.
Sincerely,
Christopher S. Carrig