Boob-tube babies.

Kid Stuff

Marketing Sex and Violence to America's Children

Edited by Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti

Johns Hopkins University Press, $29.95, 267 pp.

It's Not the Media

The Truth about Pop Culture's Influence on Children

Karen Sternheimer

Westview Press, $26, 272 pp.

In the movie Freaky Friday, Jamie Lee Curtis plays a hopelessly uncool mother who, in an early scene, drops her moody teenage daughter off at school with this cheery parting advice: "Make good choices, honey." This shift of moral authority from parent to child, with its jaunty rationalization that kids will "make good choices" on their own, is the over-arching theme of Kid Stuff. In it, contributors from diverse disciplines make the cumulatively compelling case that the popular media has undercut the moral and social authority of parents, teachers, and childrearing institutions in the civil society, leaving children to fend for themselves in a world governed by consumerist values of instant gratification and individual choice.

Such notions are not entirely new. For example, in his 1982 book, The Disappearance of Childhood, the late Neil Postman argued that the rise of a television culture broke the adult monopoly on knowledge that had existed in a book culture. This monopoly included when and how children gained access to adult "secrets," especially sexual secrets. Whoever controlled the clicker controlled access to those secrets, whether the person was two or fifty-two.

What the contributors to Kid Stuff bring to bear on Postman's thesis is the weight of empirical evidence and social experience that has accumulated since his influential, but highly speculative, essay was published. In particular, the volume considers the body of research evidence on the observed effects of television, popular music, video games, and the Internet on youthful behavior. Here, the conclusion on the harms of the popular media is qualified: most kids don't go on crime sprees or engage in casual sex as a result of media exposure, the contributors say. Yet neither are kids immune to violent or sexually explicit images and messages.

On the impact of media violence, the subject of more than eighty studies since 1975, the research consistently points to increases in aggressive feelings and behavior among kids who are exposed to such messages and images through television, video games, and movies. Moreover, as several researchers note, a heavy diet of violent images and messages numbs kids to the social and moral consequences of violent actions. As for graphic and violent depictions of sex, the few available studies suggest similar desensitizing effects. Though the violent content of gangsta rap and heavy metal music may provide an outlet for adolescent rebellion, it can also provide some troubled teens with the inspiration--even a blueprint--for violence. In fact, if your kid is a hard-core heavy-metal fan, you may want to pull the plug on the amps, says contributor Peter Christenson. Heavy metal music is strongly associated with a cluster of bad behaviors, including drinking, drugs, casual sex, Satanic beliefs, and conflict with parents.

Several contributors, including critics Todd Gitlin, Kay Hymowitz, and Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, look at the larger, if harder-to-measure, impact of the popular media on child rearing itself. Much of their analysis focuses on the encompassing nature of the media environment--the penetration of cable television, Internet, and video into children's households, even their nurseries. (Twenty-five percent of children under two have TVs in their bedrooms, according to a recent Kaiser Foundation study.) The problem, therefore, is not simply one of direct effects on behavior. It also involves indirect effects of an enveloping media environment and the sheer quantity, insipidity, and sensationalism of messages that pander to feeling, elevate the pursuit of pleasure over the mastery of knowledge, and treat people as objects or obstacles to the fulfillment of one's desires. By creating a direct channel between children and the market, moreover, the media circumvent parental authority. Still, as Kay Hymowitz argues, baby-boom parents hardly put up much of a fight. Resenting or resisting their obligations to serve as authority figures, protectors, and guides for their children, American parents have bought into "an ethos of child empowerment" that puts the responsibility for "good choices" on children themselves. And who, other than a parent, puts a television set next to the crib?

Can anything be done? The editors of Kid Stuff affirm their commitment to First Amendment principles and their opposition to government censorship. Consequently, the proposed solutions rely on grass-roots action and consumer boycotts aimed at advertisers and media moguls, as well as efforts to strengthen the spine of parents who lack the guts to just say no to too much TV. Still, the concluding essay by Newton Minow and Nell Minow invites reflection on a central question: In order to defend the right of free speech, how far do we go in surrendering our responsibilities to protect children from lurid, trashy media? Noting that First Amendment challenges to TV programming practices were almost unknown until the mid-1970s when they brought down network "family viewing time," the Minows write: "If we accept the notion that the First Amendment prohibits us from trying to protect our children from the mass media, then we have committed the perverse error of divorcing our commitment to free speech from our commitment to the public interest itself."

It's Not the Media purports to tell the "truth" about the media's influence on children but offers instead a tedious polemic. Sociologist Karen Sternheimer argues that public concerns about the media's effects on children are simply fear-based. People fear change, so they deflect their anxieties onto an easy target like the media. And since children stand at the forefront of a changing world, "the concern about the media and violence is not just a fear for children but a fear of children," she writes. Yet Sternheimer offers no evidence to support her contention. Instead, she resorts to the rhetorical tactic of verbal bludgeoning, placing the word "fear" in every chapter title, on nearly every page, and in her utterly vacuous conclusion: "Fear can be crippling", she writes, "especially when we fear something that poses no major threat."

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is the author of Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman (Broadway Books).