A Minor Rant

You know what makes me totally incensed? A good movie playing on cable TV, in which they replace the “bad” words with baby talk (I’ve been watching 25th Hour on FX). It ruins the experience, and for no good reason.

I completely reject the idea that we should infantilize and sanitize everything that kids might be exposed to. For one, that’s impossible. You can’t insulate them from everything. There is still HBO and DVD and the internet and the real world. Censoring the dialog on FX is hardly going to do the job; it’s just a meaningless and ineffectual gesture.

Furthermore, I think we seriously underestimate what kids can be safely be exposed to. At the very least, our priorities are misaligned. I am not at all convinced that so-called course language is harmful to children. But even if we assume it is, so is violence on TV (a minor, but documented effect). Tonight, the commercials alone were packed with dead, bloody bodies advertising World War II miniseries The Pacific. And yet, I didn’t see any guns replaced by their Nerf equivalents.

I’m not arguing that fictional violence is something to worry about, either. The whole issue is just a distraction from what really makes a difference in raising healthy, well-adjusted people: parents that take responsibility for their offspring, that are aware of what they’re exposed to, and that help them clearly delineate fantasy from reality. That interaction is way more essential than papering over “offensive” content and pretending it doesn’t exist. But maybe that would be asking too much.