Hallalujah
One big happy family
The Brady Bunch is Gone Forever?
Who remembers the Brady Bunch, Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best? Ahh for the days when you can remember watching honest children telling their parents when they did something wrong. Beautiful, respectful children who did nothing to disappoint their parents. Where are those kids now? I know that many times growing up The Flying Nun, That Girl, and Mary Tyler Moore were all very welcome into our home. Even Mr. Belvedere and Benson were welcome members of our extended family.
Television formed our behaviors more than we knew. When Bing Crosby died I cried for days. When I saw James Cagney as George M. Cohan and going around for weeks singing the songs from the movie. The Music Man inspired me to sing about the troubles that were caused by sinful behavior. Heck, even Fonzie, the gangster greaser from Happy Days was a good guy!
If these things formed personality traits in my mind then why is it that so many deny that the new source of influence, Bart Simpson, Miley Sirus, it's OK to be a pregnant 14 year old, it's OK to have multiple sex partners as a 19 year old. Television of my childhood is gone and is replaced with what is presumed to be harmful entertainment. Nothing is harmful in the mind of a child who idolizes those things they wish to be or have.
Behaviorism is an old concept developed, theorized, and studied by many world renowned psychologists and psychiatrists. This concept has different modules and directions but the general consensus is that behaviorism is the result of environmental stimulus and the responses that come from that stimulus. If you see it is OK to be a pregnant 14 year old on television then that is what you will begin to believe. First your daughter will treat another child her age with kindness and acceptance after she begins to show then she will see others accepting her as well, and giving her special treatment and special attention and she will want it. Since it is OK for DeGrassi kids to have babies and it is OK for someone else to have a baby then it should be OK for her to have a baby.
Good kids need to come back to our mainstream. Hillary Duff had a great show as a teenager but now that she's grown she has turned into a very unwelcoming young woman. She is rude and standoffish, She does not accept that her own persona, that of a good girl, and has decided to be practically a heathen to keep people away.
Good children are those who read Nancy Drew and Harry Potter and even Goosebumps. Good children are the ones who like Spongebob Squarepants and Casper the Friendly Ghost and not South Park and The Simpsons. Good children are the ones that are listening to their parents and are not paying attention to the behaviors of characters that are fictional.
Television characters are so real to children and it is like no one is making sure the viewers understand that these people are fake and should not be followed.
Until parents, media, production companies, and even cartoonists stop trying to lean over the edge of acceptability we will continue to produce children who will display less self respect, less parental respect, less authority respect. Just less respect in general. Let us take back our children, our family, our respect.
