When I wake up in the morning, I usually watch the morning news shows for ten minutes while I drink some coffee. Then I get the kids and make breakfast and all. Usually the TV stays on, so I can catch more news as I'm running around the house finding homework sheets and tying shoe laces.
I can't do that anymore.
A few weeks ago, Adam Lambert got in trouble for simulating oral sex with a male dancer during some music award show. People were annoyed that this happened during a family show, and there was controversy. Controversy that had to be discussed by the morning news shows. They showed the clip of the dance routine and blurred out the suggestive bits, but then Ann Curry or somebody narrated what was happening behind the blurry cloud. "And then Adam grabbed the male dancer's head and repeatedly thrust his pelvis into the guy's mouth simulating oral sex."
Jonah was standing right there. I ran around the room searching for the remote, so I could turn the channel. Then didn't even warn me. Ugh.
Now we have Tiger Woods 24/7 and the parade of sluts. The gossip shows, which are on at 7:00 PM, are interviewing the bimbos who describe how good Tiger was in bed, how he liked to have sex while taking sleeping pills, and even the size of his endowment. They keep showing a clip of a topless woman relating the time that she had sex with Tiger at a bachelor party. Sure, they have key bits blurred out, but it's very obvious that she's topless.
Digression. I'm amazed at these women who sleep with famous people and then store the information away like a trust fund for a rainy day. Minutes after the car accident, did hundreds of women call their lawyers and hire image consultants? ET and Playboy are calling! Girls all over America are taking notes. /Digression.
He's only ten. He's ready for the sperm/egg type of sex education, not the topless floozy type of sex education. We knew that 8:00 sitcoms were off limits, but the news?!! I want him to watch Obama's speech in Oslo and coverage of the war in Afghanistan. Body counts don't scare me. Naked bodies are a different story.
I never thought I would say this, but I miss the Cosby show.
Apt. 11d 
We don’t have the TV news on in front of our kids (two girls, 6 and 8). We do leave NPR on in the car when the kids are listening. You always get a warning from NPR when it’s going to be grim.
My bigger beef is how I can’t watch a baseball or football game with my kids in the room because of the R-rated beer ads.
When it comes to the sex stuff, I know Americans are prudes, and I try to strike a balance. But especially for my girls I am constantly worried about them being objectified. I fight the Hannah Montana stuff daily it seems. My 8 year old is already asking if she’s too fat. And that same 8YO has had the sex talk, because she asked. What’s a mom to do? (Besides move to Utah and home school.)
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I don’t listen to radio news when my nine year old is in the car. Though I might be able to — I listen to CBC (Canadian public radio) and they tend to warn about really grim stuff. But there’s plenty of mildly grim news, too.
We didn’t watch TV news when she was awake for years. We now sometimes watch The Newshour, which is low on gossip though not always child friendly. Remote in hand. In general I find local news horrifying, all fires and shootings, so I don’t usually watch it anyway.
We get the local daily paper and sometimes need to bury a certain section to keep her from seeing it. We are doing so less and pretty much only for sexual issues now. (Positive and negative coverage — sexual gossip/violence and lifestyle articles on trends in sex paraphenalia.) War, disaster, violent crime, those she needs to start understanding within limits.
Last week she got to the paper before me and asked: “Why does Tiger Woods need to apologize?” The front page was a bit cryptic, and maybe it was when the details were still pretty cryptic. I gave her a simple answer and that was that. If she was a golf fan I think I would have needed to talk about it more.
Like jen, I worry a lot about her having space to form a positive self-image without the baggage of our culture’s objectification. But I know I’m losing that battle.
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My daughter is 15 now, so I don’t worry so much about what’s on TV–it’s the real boys who are the worry–but this reminds me of when she was about 8 and the Kobe Bryant rape case was all in the news. She sort of understood what sex was (except not really, as will become clear), but rape was not something either her parents or her school had discussed with her. So she asked me. I started to explain, but the funny thing is, about halfway through, she lost interest. Just changed the subject, as if I had been talking about the Peloponnesian war.
Now adults may find talking about sex inappropriate in certain circumstances, but they really never start a conversation on a sexual topic and then lose interest. This made me realize the mental gulf between an 8-year-old and me.
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I’m the same way, and I definitely take it as a sign I’m getting old – hopefully, you don’t feel the same way. My current peeve is commercials during sports shows. I am actually a football fan (I know, I know), and the commercials they show are HORRIBLE. “Tune in later to find out who committed GORY crime on CSI or CSI-like show.” “Nearly naked woman selling product not for minors.” All at two in the afternoon! While I’d like to introduce my sons to sports, the violence (off field!) and sexism during the commercials is making me turn the TV off. In the end, probably a good thing, but still bums me out.
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tivo/dvr everything and watch it on a time delay, with remote in hand. Doesn’t work great for news and probably not too great for sports (if you actually care). But, I guess you could introduce it to your kids.
We can’t listen to NPR with the kids. There’s way too much grim news on. Our younger still comes to our room at night, and we’ve ha to give up waking up to NPR, ’cause it seems like it always starts with something like a busload of people fell off a cliff and died this morning, somewhere.
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The violent news bothers me much more. I stopped listening to news on the radio to protect my kids from having wars and murders in their face. Naked bodies- who cares? Personally, I’d point out that I think it’s strange that people are so inexplicably interested in other people’s sex lives and move on.
Why does a description of simulated oral sex bother you more than the war in Afghanistan?
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Has anyone here been busted in flagrante delicto by the kids? I have not … and I can see where that would pretty much end this kind of prudishness.
Does anyone remember the John Leguizamo bit from years back, where he recounts his kindergartner explaining to the class how his dad brushes his mom’s teeth with his privates? Ouch.
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I would rather not explain a blow job to a ten year old who still believes Santa. There are far more details about the sex life of Woods than there are details about the war. The news give two seconds of coverage. Any discussion of casualties are clinical and abstract. Maybe it shouldn’t be.
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I’m offering this only in the most abstract sense, because I don’t have kids so don’t have to negotiate this minefield myself. But isn’t this one of the things the U.S. is always criticized for (e.g. in movies), not blinking an eye at scenes of carnage but freaking out if someone shows a nipple?
(So I guess this kind of goes along with Sarah’s comment.)
That said, the objectification thing for girls is obviously of HUGE concern.
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I’ve given up on television news, cable or otherwise. But then again, we’ve also given up on broadcast television, period. We are constant radio news listeners (and yes, we contribute); as Jen noted, NPR is pretty good at warning you if a news story coming up is going to be particularly grim or graphic, giving you time to mute it or change the channel.
My wife and I happily confess to being prudes of a sort. (Though our oldest did almost catch Melissa and I in the act once, Jen.) I’d like to believe that I do not have a particularly skewed sense of concern when it comes to sex vs. violence, though perhaps I do. In any case, with four girls, currently aged 13 through 3, I know they are in for years and years of exposure to crude, often salacious, frequently misogynistic advertisements, imagery, and comments, simply because they are female. I prefer not to expose them to news that perpetuates that unfortunate fact of life.
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A year or two ago, right in the middle of High School Musical hysteria, there was a scandal about a naked pic of Vanessa Hudgens. My daughter (then 8 or so) found out about it. Excellent teaching moment. Also, good reason to make sure she doesn’t have a cell phone with a camera.
I read all the “I Can Has Cheezeburger” sites with my kids. I have to explain that penises are always funny. And yeah, there are some jokes I don’t want her to get. But sometimes I just say “I don’t think that’s appropriate for you right now.”
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We’ve almost had to stop watching regularly scheduled tv, mostly because of ads–those erectile dysfunction medication commercials run non-stop. Netflix all the way. I find even The News Hour too graphic for our nine year old and have switched off NPR many a morning because of the content. I don’t want to–I’d like her to know what’s going on in the world but I’m not prepared to explain genocide or strafing during the 10 minutes I get to spend with her in the morning.
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“Also, good reason to make sure she doesn’t have a cell phone with a camera.”
http://www.slate.com/id/2237706/
This is an Emily Bazelon piece: “Hope Witsell’s Sexting Suicide:
Why kids self-destruct with cell phones and online.”
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My kids already know that penises are funny. We’ve had to have discussions to explain that other people don’t think that they’re funny.
To explain a little further. We’re a fairly hippy family around here. Naked bodies aren’t a big thing to my kids. They’ve had to be told to not strip down in front of my nieces. They don’t know about blow jobs yet and they don’t know about the details about sex that have come out in the Tiger Woods drama. I don’t think we’re prudish about that stuff. I consider ourselves fairly average.
My kids haven’t caught us, yet. Thank God for Saturday morning cartoons.
Thanks for sharing that really cute story, y81.
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Really, it gets much worse than catching your parents in the act.
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About the only morning newscast I will watch is one from nearby-ish big city. The national broadcasts on either side of the border tend to give the sex scandals detailed, doting coverage with all sorts of replay and talking heads. Even though both of my kids are teenagers, it’s simply boring and stupid to spend the morning watching some TV anchor weigh in this junk.
Ironically, I was quite happy to have my kids hang out while we watched the new series of “Battlestar Galactica” with all of that show’s sexual content. I don’t have a problem with sex on TV: I have a problem with breathless TV commentary about sexual “misconduct” and sexual “content”.
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Another family that gave up TV news for NPR years ago. And yes, our eldest walked in on us once, under the covers, and complained to his father that Dad was “bunching mom up”.
Our kids were in middle and elementary school on 9/11/2001, and in the habit of coming into bed to snuggle with us and listen to the radio in the morning. It was awful, lying there with them, thinking how our, and their world would be changed forever. But we’re sort of about facing things together, and the morning snuggle is probably a better place than most from which to take on the big bad world.
RE the ED ads, I inadvertently mortified my husband, kids and their friends who were all watching basketball in our living room. My hubby is a family doc, and I was doing some work at his office at the time, and was really annoyed with the volume of Cialis/Levitra/etc. swag I needed to move aside to get any work done at all. So my highschool aged kids, their pals and said hubby are all watching basketball when the ad comes on, and I walk through with a load of laundry and declare “I have HAD IT with freaking Erectile Dysfunction!” The room goes silent, and my beloved clears his throat and says “I’m thinking you’d like to clarify for these young men exactly WHAT your issue with ED is?” Arg. No, really, ED is not an issue in my personal life, I’m just tired of not being able to find the desk for all the stupid viagra pens!
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