Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment
...listen to an album or watch MTV especially if it is time to do schoolwork. Furthermore, outside the home, the distractions are even more alluring. Children no longer hang out on a neighborhood corner within earshot of Mom or Dad's reminder to come in and do homework. Instead, they congregate in vast shopping malls, video arcades, and gleaming fast-food restaurants. Furthermore, parents and school assignments have obvious diffculty competing with such enticing alternatives. Besides dealing with these distractions, parents have to shield their children from aflood of sexually explicit materials. For instance, today children can find sex magazines and pornographic paperbacks in the same corner stone that once offered only comics and candy. In addition, children will not see the fuzzily photographed nudes that a previous generation did but will encounter the hard-core raunchiness of Penthouse or Playboy. Furthermore, the movies young people attend often focus on highly sexual situations. To illustrate, it is difficult to teach children traditional values when films show teachers seducing students and young people treating sex as a casual sport. In addition, an even more difficult matter for parents is the heavily sexual content of programs on television. Furthermore, with just flick of the dial, children can see soap-opera stars cavorting in bed or watch cable programs where nudity is common. One of the most disturbing to parents today, however, is the increase in life threatening dangers that face young people. For example, when children are small, parents fear that their youngsters may be victims of violence. In addition, every news program seems to carry a report about a mass murder who preys on young girls, a organized child pornography ring that molests preschoolers. Furthermore, when children are older, parents begin to worry about their kids use of drugs. In addition, peer pressure to experiment with drugs is often stronger then parents warnings. This pressure to experi...