'Band-Aid solutions' do not supplant parents' roles

Liz Lucas Country Feedback

By some standards, children are being better protected today than ever.

Last week, tobacco companies agreed to remove Joe Camel's image from their advertising, on the theory that the suave, nicotine-addicted beast encouraged kids to smoke.

Also, all the major TV networks (except NBC) agreed to step up the TV ratings system, adding letters to denote a program's content - 'S' for sex, 'V' for violence, etc. In theory, this would help parents decide what shows their children should and shouldn't watch.

The key word here is "theory." These ideas sound wonderful, but in practice, they're not likely to do children much good.

For example, most kids begin smoking out of curiosity, or because their friends already smoke. I don't know any people who started smoking because their role model was a camel - changing tobacco ads will probably not be very effective.

As for the TV ratings, well, kids are going to love them - there's no better way to decide what to watch "This one's got violence and language! Cool!"

So why have these solutions been proposed? Because they're easier than actually confronting a problem.

In the smoking debate, there are more pressing issues than advertising. It would be worthwhile to find out how underage kids can get cigarettes, or why they don't take the health risks of smoking into account, or why no one is telling them to stop.

We might want to think about why so many children are home alone, watching programs they probably shouldn't be seeing. To go along with that, there's the strange fact that, in an unprecedentedly stable economy, most families still need two paychecks to get by - assuming there are two parents in the family to begin with. Which brings us back to the unsupervised child at home.

People our age have had to contend with three things our parents' generation rarely faced: Single-parent families, economic uncertainty and regulations designed to protect us. That last item may well be a result of the first two.

Let's say there are two kids, born in the late '70s, as most of us were. Their parents are divorced and their mother works most of the time. After school they go home alone and smoke cigarettes they got from a friend, or listen to a tape that has a "Parental Advisory" sticker on it, or sneak into an R-rated movie.

Probably all of us have done these things at some point in our lives. And while we were doing them, our parents were no doubt thinking that we'd be safe - that our friends couldn't get cigarettes, that the record store wouldn't sell us advisory-labeled music, that the TV programs after school were all right to watch.

As we all know, we weren't necessarily safe - we got away with plenty of things. The regulations made no difference, except to give our parents some peace of mind. But a false sense of security doesn't do anyone much good.

When parents can't supervise their children as closely as they'd like to, for whatever reason, they put their faith in these regulations. They hope that the cigarette-advertising restrictions, or the TV ratings, will be just as effective as parental authority. But these rules won't work - there really is no substitute for a parent. We should all consider this simple fact before we start looking for more Band-Aid solutions.

- Reach Liz Lucas over e-mail at erelucas@umich.edu.

07-16-97