Parents, Kids, and Media

A few days ago I was watching an episode of Family Guy on hulu.com and an interesting advertisement was played during the break. The commercial showed a teenage kid playing what looked like a computer game and when his mother walked into the room, he closed the game so it looked like he was doing homework. Then a message something like this appeared "how can we know what kind of information our kids are getting from the other parent" (meaning media). The commercial was for a site called commonsense.org I was intrigued by the commercial so I paused the video and browsed around the website a bit. What I found, at least from my perspective as an adolescent, was rather disturbing. The site was largely based on instructing parents on how to control what media their children are exposed to. The two sections I read were about managing the music you let your kids listen to and monitoring the browsing history of your children. The section about music suggested that parents monitor songs purchased with iTunes because there was a chance that their child may have bought songs with *gasp* explicit lyrics! The idea that your teenage son/daughter will never be exposed to "adult language" if you are able to control what music they listen to seems rather far fetched to me. As for the article about checking the history on your teenager's computer, I was most disturbed by a section that suggested that if your kid's computer shows no history it means they have been "Covering their tracks" meaning that "they've been somewhere they think you don't want them to go". I can only speak for myself, but I set my browser to automatically clear the history whenever I close it simply because I don't like the idea of someone being able to look up all the sites I have visited. I feel like someone willing to do that could only have bad intentions. Anyway, my overall opinion of the site is that it encourages parents to try to control their children and force values upon them rather than trust them and allow them to become their own person. But that's just me, tell me what you think