Censorship
Most people don’t want their kids to see a lot of nasty, grown-up stuff.
Fiction or reality, I think most of us subscribe to a concept of ‘age-appropriate information,’ the idea that young minds are not ready for grown-up concepts like death and sex. I don’t hold with it, and I have many reasons.
1. Childhood is for learning. Children soak up a lot of info, it’s what their brains do best, and learning can become more difficult with age.
2. Censorship is bad. People that employ it are not the ones who are thinking in your interests. It’s not something you do to someone you love, the withholding of information. Knowledge is power, and anyone working to limit knowledge is trying to gain power over someone.
We can have a better relationship with our children than a repressive government has with its citizens, right? After all, we’re supposed to be teaching them, not making sure they don’t learn.
3. If there are things you won’t tell your kids, you can be sure someone else will, and maybe not the way you’d like.
4. I don’t really trust my own – or anyone’s – judgement about what to teach and what to restrict. So to make sure they get all the correct info, we have to make sure they get it all, period.
5. It’s what we have to do to enforce our control over their information. It’s more of the ‘non-violent punishment’ argument, it’s a kind of abuse, another place where communication ends and some ‘more than verbal’ methods are invoked. Do we physically restrain the child when he or she reaches for the bad book? Do we banish the child to their room, or leave him or her alone while we go elsewhere to talk about serious, grown-up matters?
6. “Family Entertainment:”
At the risk of compromising my power as an author by letting slip that my family watches quite a bit of television, I have to talk about it.
If that’s all your kids can see on television, then rest assured your children’s TV time is controlled by the lobbying power of the religious Right. “Family entertainment” is just smart enough for your three year-old, and no-one in your family is in any danger of learning anything from it. It is censorship, and censorship is always a power grab. Those who have created the format for “family entertainment” and convinced us that it’s appropriate for our children are gaining some power over our kids.
You want smart kids? Show them everything. Let them watch anything on television, let them in on your “adult” conversations.
Remember the old line, Knowledge is Power. The more your children know, the more power they will have over their lives. Any limitation of their knowledge, regardless of the “negative” nature of the particular information, will only hinder them in the long run.
Here’s a possible list of things your kids will need to know about:
How Grandpa X may be a horrible drunk and a wife-beater
How Aunt Y may have gotten an abortion
Everything alive dies
There is very little evidence of gods or ghosts
Religion fills a need for many people
How much money we do or don’t have
Shit happens
Their parents don’t know everything, not even close
Don’t worry, they can handle it. It’s us that can’t.
