There’s an old adage that holds that as soon a man’s become especially good at something he immediately begins to overestimate its importance. Baseball players speak of being witnesses to a great moment in history whenever the home-run record is challenged, forgetting that the event in question is all about hitting a ball with a stick.
The same is true of those of us who study the media. Whether we love it or hate it, whether we work in it, critique it, run scientific studies on it, or just pay special attention to it as parents, the more time we spend with it, the more important we think it is in our children’s lives. In fact, it becomes far more important to us than to the children, who are blissfully unaware of it as anything but entertainment.
The opposite may be true of parenting. Because none of us ever feel like we really know what we’re doing, it’s easy for us to fear that we’re insignificant and powerless–especially in the face of a huge, arrogant, intrusive entertainment industry that’s criticized by so many experts. Senator Joe Lieberman recently said that the purpose of congressional hearings on entertainment isn’t so much to open the door to legislation as to educate parents and reassure them that someone’s on their side. Parents, he said, “feel they are competing with the entertainment industry to teach their kids values.”
I’ve talked to many parents who do believe just that. But the more research I do, the more I see the belief as just a perception–and a self-defeating perception at that. Most of the trouble adults and children have around entertainment, including some young people’s tendency to be overly influenced by it, derives from adults falling into that competitive relationship. Children’s entertainment can be a very constructive aspect of life when adults break out of the belief that they have to compete with it and instead start using it as a partner and a tool. There are many techniques that adults can employ to help children use entertainment well. I group them into three categories: modeling, mirroring, and mentoring.
Every bit of research on the relationship between children’s behavior and entertainment, even those that find substantial correlations, shows that entertainment is a far less significant influence than peers, school, socioeconomic environment, and, especially, family. The Leonard Eron studies, the bedrock of all psychological criticism of violent television, found a correlation of about 10 percent between aggression and viewing habits, but the correlation it found between aggression and family patterns ran as high as 50 percent. Parents who were aggressive were far more likely to have kids who were aggressive, no matter what they watched on TV. Similar patterns hold true whatever kind of behavior is being studied. Teenagers who smoke, drink, commit suicide, take too many risks, have eating disorders, and are sexually promiscuous usually have parents or other adult role models with similar self-destructive habits. The power of parents is so much greater than the power of the media that any reasonably good parenting renders any media influence insignificant.
The greatest power we have is modeling. What we tell them matters, the limits and consequences we impose on them matter, the experiences we expose them to matter–but far more important is simply who we are when they’re watching. And they’re watching from the beginning. When we feed a baby, and he gazes up at us with those huge, all-absorbing eyes, he is gobbling up not just milk but every piece of information he can comprehend on what a human being is. From the moment a child understands that he will someday grow up into an adult, the adults he sees every day become his vision of what an adult is supposed to be. Even if a teenager wants to be radically different from his parents, they remain the source of his most basic, unquestioned picture of adulthood.
The way to teach empathy is to be empathetic with your child. The way to teach nonviolence is to be nonviolent. And the way to teach a healthy perspective toward entertainment is to model a healthy perspective. Whatever power the entertainment industry has in a child’s life is usually given to it by his or her parents.
Cynthia, whose daughter Emily was so interested in guns and then Britney Spears, told me that she once caught herself in the middle of complaining about the power of the media to pull her daughter’s values away from her own. “I could suddenly hear my mother saying the same thing about me!” When she was little she liked Mad magazine and other humor that her mother thought was in bad taste. In her teens it was rock music. Cynthia was always looking for something that would push her mother’s buttons and assert her independence. She still has that anti-authoritarian streak, and she will often opt for confrontation rather than playing the game. But so did her mother. And so does Emily, a trait that Cynthia values in her.“It suddenly hit me that with the guns and Britney, Emily was doing exactly what I’d done. If she was going to be independent it had to be about things I didn’t like. She was objecting to my tastes, but as far as the fundamental values went, they were completely mine.”
Young people will always play with fantasy selves startlingly different from their parents in order to broaden their personalities and build their own lives. No matter how much a child may want to be like a media figure in fantasy, however, no matter how precisely she may dress and talk like a TV character, at bottom she knows that she isn’t going to grow up to be a flashing image on a glass screen. TV shows, movies, and music may speak to her emotions and fantasies in many ways, but they don’t teach her how to get from moment to moment through the whole day or how to respond to every little incident of real life. We parents become so accustomed just to being there that we forget that we are our children’s points of reference, every day and in every way. Even if a child’s attention is mostly focused on a TV show, it won’t be the show that will make the deepest impression on her idea of how she is supposed to behave–it will be the way mom or dad behaves while the show is on. Expressing anger or anxiety about a child’s entertainment won’t make her like the entertainment less–but it will model anger and anxiety for her. She’s not likely to shape her real behavior around what she sees characters do on the glass screen. But if she sees parents allowing entertainment violence but treating others lovingly, she will get the message, “An adult is supposed to be okay with make-believe violence but not make it real.”
Effective modeling can certainly involve telling children what we don’t like. We can get so caught up in the debate about whether entertainment is “harmful” that we forget our right to an opinion. Saying, “I don’t like that show,” or “I don’t want that hateful song to be played in my house,” models decisiveness and moral courage. It’s far more useful for a child to see a parent calmly stating an opinion than dithering in worry. The kids, of course, will learn from their parents’ example and start declaring their own tastes with equal strength. But mutually respectful arguments are good ways for families to explore problems, bond, and broaden their limits.
Mirroring is one of the basic tools that parents use to help children develop, usually without even thinking about it. The baby smiles and we smile back. He runs around laughing and we run and laugh with him, and punctuate it with a squealed, “You’re running!” Students of language development see it as one of the building blocks of speech. “Ball!”“That’s a ball! Where is the ball?”“Nicky hand!”“Yes, the ball is in Nicky’s hand!” Developmental experts now see mirroring (under one name or another) as a vital process in healthy emotional maturation as well. Only a few decades ago, parents would say, “He’s only crying because he wants attention.” They feared that giving in to a child’s desires would make him more needy or less able to control his desires. We’ve come to understand that meeting a child’s need for attention early in his development has the opposite effect. Children need to be seen. They need to know they exist, that adults are aware of them and what they’re doing. Simply repeating back to a young child what she says strengthens her self-confidence. If she says, “The doggie scares me,” the response she probably needs most of all is just, “Yeah, the doggie scares you.” From there she’ll be better able to respond to “The doggie’s safe,” or “Why does it scare you?”
The need for mirroring becomes more subtle as childhood progresses, but it remains strong. In my workshops I see how kids brighten up when I do little more than acknowledge their work and their fantasies. It’s most overt in the early grades, when kids beam at me the whole time I’m looking at their pictures or listening to their stories. But even an eighth-grader at the nadir of self-consciousness and pretended indifference will usually puff up a little or make brief eye contact when I say, “You’re into Goth, huh?” As parents, one of the simplest and best things we can do is just acknowledge what they like. Look at them and smile as they shoot you, listen to their retellings of Jurassic Park, ask them what shooter video games they think are coolest.
Sometimes, of course, kids will resist discussing their tastes with us, especially as they’re passing through their early teens. They need to set themselves apart from their parents and may push for confrontations or small-scale rejections to achieve it. They may also consider their own desire for adult attention immature and go to great lengths to conceal it. They may not respond cheerfully to a mother asking, “Did you beat that level on Half-Life today, dear?” And they do need their privacy. Watching television or playing video games in isolation is usually a productive way to shut out real stresses and regroup for real life. The music-formed fantasyland of a Walkman can be a very soothing retreat.
Psychiatrist Lynn Ponton has stressed, however, that parents often think that separation and privacy are all teenagers really need, when in fact their need for attention, guidance, and approval is even greater in early adolescence than in the preteen years. They’re in a frightening transition; like a toddler who darts away from his mother and then stops anxiously and demands to be picked up, adolescents want to push adults away but still know that someone is watching over them.
The key, she said, is maintaining an open relationship in which communication flows easily back and forth about every subject of concern to both the parent and the child. Because it is important to keep fantasy in a realistic perspective, entertainment should neither be a closed topic nor one that becomes overemphasized by rules, cautions, or anxious parental lectures. Even when parents find their children’s entertainment offensive or troubling, the best way for them to keep it in perspective is just to let it be “what the kids are into.” Ponton often begins her relationships with teenage patients by asking them to bring in the CDs, movies, video games, or books they like. She’ll often spend several sessions with a new patient just listening to Pearl Jam together or playing D.O.A. against each other. Conversations about their deeper concerns–conversations they’ve resisted with adults until then–often open up from that shared immersion in fantasy. Respecting teenagers’ privacy and separate lives is crucial to maintaining an open relationship with them, but merely letting them know that someone is aware of them and supports them in the painful struggle of growing up is very reassuring to them. Encourage them to play their music on the family stereo sometimes instead of always on a Walkman–and if you hate it, tell them so. Roll your eyes in mock disgust and say, “Where did I go wrong?” Give them room to disagree or dismiss you with, “It’s just a song! ”
Our culture leads us to be leery of a child’s most fervent appetites–especially when those appetites are excited by a profiteering industry. Children’s desires, however, usually reflect their needs. Children love sugar and force adults to make decisions several times a day about whether to say yes or no. We feel in competition with sugar’s power, resent the candy and cereal industries for pushing it, and are quick to believe that it’s harmful. In the 1970s, some spotty research linking sugar to hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder, and other maladies touched the nerves of millions of parents; the studies were soon debunked, but fear of its effects still lingers. Sugar does present challenges–it kills kids’ appetites, too much of it causes an energy rush followed by a sharp decline, it’s conducive to tooth decay–but it’s also a useful part of a complete diet. An increasing number of teachers and coaches encourage their students to load up on sugar and carbohydrates for energy right before a big test, arts performance, or game. And the human craving for sugar is fundamental; it induces newborns to take milk and, later on, draws kids to fruit and other foods. We may need to set limits, but children crave it for very good reasons.
Action entertainment is similarly appealing to kids and just as ruthlessly marketed to them. We feel a similar threat from it and look for danger signs in research. But children also crave it for very healthy and legitimate reasons. Obviously people don’t always crave things that are good for them, as drugs and cigarettes show. But young children almost never crave anything harmful, and even most adolescents handle their experimentations well, unless depression or anger makes them self-destructive. “Young people generally make sensible choices,” said Lynn Ponton. “It’s important to take action if they are clearly making a mistake, but it’s just as important that they learn to trust themselves and make their own decisions.”
It can be hard to trust those choices, especially when they’re choosing just what the adult world deplores: gross humor, bloody video games, misogynistic rappers, professional wrestling. It’s tempting to mirror only the behavior we like and ignore the others, hoping they’ll fade away. It’s the behavior we refuse to acknowledge, however, that will trouble them most. They’ll need to have those sides of themselves seen, and if parents won’t do it, they’ll find someone who will. One of the great appeals of the entertainment industry is its ability to make its audience feel acknowledged. An angry kid who feels ignored by his parents and school is thrilled to hear a rocker or rapper reflect his anger back to him. A kid who feels powerless knows that the video game industry is noticing his desire for power, if only by creating fantasies to sell to him. His desire to feel more powerful is healthy, and so is his desire to have it seen and acknowledged. The adults in his life can help him become more complete and self-aware simply by affirming that.
My son always used power fantasies to help himself through anxiety-provoking transitions. At the beginning of every school year from preschool through first grade, he became a dinosaur–no docile plant eater either, but the biggest and most savage carnivore he could think of. He’d want to play dinosaur fights with his friends and family, and if no one wanted to play he’d go off by himself and fight invisible enemies. I was happy to play along because I could see how stressful he found social challenges, and I could see the calm the fantasies brought him. After the jitters of the first few weeks, the dinosaurs would yield to fish, frogs, and the other creatures of his imagination.
When Nicky was in the first grade, however, his mother and I separated. I expected him to turn to violent games with greater intensity than ever, but he went to the opposite extreme; he transformed into cute little animals that spoke baby-talk, acted silly, loved to be cuddled, and needed to be rescued. I realized that he was so frightened by this huge shift in his world that he didn’t feel safe in the combative fantasies that he’d used to feel strong and self-reliant before. He didn’t want to be self-reliant. He wanted to be little again, like he’d been before we split up, and be taken care of.
Jennie and I responded in two ways:we gave him as much reassurance as we could that he would always be taken care of, even if his parents weren’t living together, and we paid special attention to encouraging any glimmer of the power fantasies that we saw. We continued to recognize and affirm his cuddly fantasies, because he clearly needed them, but we felt that it was at least as important that he recover his “Tyrannosaurus self.” Whenever he’d mention sharks or Digimon or any other symbol of savagery or courage, I’d show special interest. When he started to show interest again in playing our “war game,” I made sure I had the time and energy to oblige.
Then something interesting happened; some silly stories he’d begun telling about his hedgehog Beanie Baby began to take an adventurous turn. He and I took turns telling “chapters” at bedtime, and pretty soon the “Hedge Fighter” stories, about a silly but intrepid (and often violent) band of animal action heroes, were running through all his “Daddy days.” He started asking Jennie to contribute characters, too, a way of linking us together. With time, as he became more secure in the new status quo, those fantasies settled back among his others. When Jennie and I started the marriage over again, at the beginning of Nicky’s third grade, the whole gamut of his power fantasies exploded in celebration: Hedge Fighters jockeying with dinosaurs, Ultraman, and other imaginary combatants of days past.
As part of our unconscious policy of ignoring scary feelings and hoping they’ll go away, we fall into the trap of thinking that a child’s violent fantasies are safest when they’re passive and most threatening when they’re active. In fact, as my own work with storytelling has shown me, kids integrate their thoughts and feelings more effectively the more actively they work through those fantasies.
Heather Adamson is a journalist, the mother of three boys, and an officer with the parents’ association at their school. She deals frequently with the message from teachers, school administrators, and other parents that violent entertainment is a bad influence, and she has tried to minimize her sons’ exposure to it. For the most part, they didn’t show much interest in it until her oldest son Noel entered the fourth grade. He was the mildest of her boys, a shy kid who was overwhelmed by his more aggressive peers. Suddenly, he threw himself into a Japanese cartoon called Tenchi with a consuming passion that he’d never shown for anything before–such a consuming passion that Heather began to worry about it.
“One evening he came to me in tears,” she remembered. “I asked him what was wrong and he blurted out, ‘I wish reincarnation were true!’ I was thrown by that and all I could do was ask him what had brought it on.” Noel started talking about a character in Tenchi who was reincarnated, and then said he wished he could live in the world of Tenchi, where no one had to die. Heather had already gathered that much of Tenchi’s appeal was that it was very complex but predictable, that nothing bad ever really happened, at least permanently, to the characters he cared about. At the time, Noel’s father was often taken away by work, Heather was trying to take care of the two younger boys, run the household, and keep her career afloat, and neither of them was as available to Noel as they would have liked. The cartoon world was his refuge.
“But as he talked about it, he told me something that really startled me,” she said. “He was worried about how much he loved Tenchi. He was troubled by the fact that he thought about it so much, and he thought if other people knew what was going on inside his mind they’d think he was crazy.”
Heather reassured him that his interest in Tenchi was sane and safe. Only then did Noel reveal what had kicked off the whole process: he’d had a Tenchi-inspired dream. The fourth-graders and fifth-graders were having a war, one grade with ice powers and the other with fire. Noel had the power to act like a connection between them, so he stepped into the middle of the war and brought them together. “Then they were all just like warm water,” he said, “and everyone was peaceful.”
Heather told him that not only was there nothing wrong with him but that she would help him write down the dream as soon as she could. He didn’t wait until she was free; he wrote it down by himself, the first time he’d ever sat down for an hour and written something that he didn’t have to.“He brought it to me at the dinner table,” Heather said, “and as I was reading it, the kid was literally dancing around the room. He was so proud of himself for having done this. He was even proud of himself for having such a crazy imagination!” Noel started writing down other dreams and fantasies, and Heather could see his spirits lift. “He told me later that school was a lot better because he didn’t feel like he had to stop himself from thinking about Tenchi anymore.”
Noel used a superheroic cartoon universe to give form to his terrors about life changes, big kids, and his own powerlessness. While he dwelt in that universe in isolation, it worried him. All his mother had to do was suggest a way to open that universe to others, and he took it from there.
One worry parents mention often is their inability to supervise their kids when they watch TV or play video games. Even when they control media use tightly in the home, the kids will always have opportunities for unsupervised watching and playing at friends’ homes. These parents trust that their presence can mitigate the media’s effects, but they fear what may happen in their absence.
The reality is that the power of parents is so much greater than that of entertainment that one good conversation is worth countless hours of media time. Ray Portillo, a retired educator and public policy consultant, told me about an incident he still remembered vividly from his childhood, nearly seventy years earlier. He loved radio serials when he was little, but sometimes he found the suspense almost unbearable. Once his father was passing through the room as the Shadow was caught in a deathtrap, and Ray asked him nervously, “Do you think he’ll survive?” His father said, “Son, if he doesn’t survive, that’ll be the end of the show.” Then he left the room. “That one little remark changed the way I looked at entertainment forever,” Portillo said. “I still loved it, but I always knew that someone was behind it, selling it to me.”
After years studying the link between media use and behavior, Dr. Stuart Fischoff of the California State University at Los Angeles Media Psychology Laboratory has concluded:“Kids want to know what’s real. They want to make sense of what they see. They only run into trouble if they don’t know how to fit it into a real context. If you take even just a little time to talk to a child about what he or she is watching, then you have to worry not at all about the effects of the media.”
We often underestimate children’s ability to grasp what’s real and what’s not. “Children have no trouble recognizing cartoon violence as unreal at a very early age, generally as early as two years,” reported Lenore Terr, author of Beyond Love and Work. Although children typically haven’t completely mastered the difference between their own fantasies and reality until the age of seven or eight, video images are much easier for them. They look nothing like reality, after all: flat images contained in a box that change instantaneously–a face suddenly replaced by a whole body, another face, a building–that often resemble nothing a child ever sees in life. In fact, they are more likely not to recognize cartoon characters or strange figures like Power Rangers as even being human at first, instead seeing them as something humanlike but unique to TV.The TV-watching child’s first task isn’t usually distinguishing video from reality but learning that the strange images on TV are supposed to relate to reality in some way.
The danger isn’t so much that a child of any age would ever imagine that a make-believe show represents a condition that really exists, but that children might invest too much importance in their own emotional reactions to it. They need to understand that what they experience during a fight scene is a fun feeling of power but not an emotion that’s dangerously powerful itself. Some people fear that kids will develop a “false sense of power” by fantasizing or playing a video game, but in fact the feeling of make-believe power, if enjoyed openly, eases some of their need to pretend to themselves that they’re really more powerful than they are. What matters is what children do with their entertainment in real-world behavior, not what it reminds us of. If we can make that distinction clear through our reactions, we’ll pass it on to them.
Many critics have argued that entertainment teaches children that violence is a good way to settle problems. Reality, however, is a good corrective to that. The first time a child imitates a Power Ranger by kicking a playmate and is rewarded with a crying friend, angry parents, an abrupt end to the game, and a sore foot, he learns that make-believe and the real world operate on fundamentally different laws. One of the great charms of a make-believe world is that the very behaviors that we know won’t solve problems in the complex, constraining real world will work there.
The limits of the media’s instructive powers become obvious when we look at advertising. Both the practitioners and the critics of advertising have shown that no sales campaign can make people buy what they fundamentally don’t want. The most expensive and artful campaigns fail when consumers are disposed against the product. This is why marketers hire “cool hunters” to discover what kids want and develop ways to package it–first comes the buyer’s desire, then the product to exploit it. As one TV marketer told me, “If a kid wants a new toy to play with, or wants to be as cool as his friends, then a commercial can excite his appetite and focus it on one product. The slickest commercials ever made, inundating every kids’ show, wouldn’t make him want to eat brussels sprouts or clean his room.” Children want to have exciting fantasies, but they usually don’t want to suffer injuries, get in serious trouble, or alienate the rest of the world. Consequently, the media can inspire them to play violent games–but not even a constant diet of the most exciting media violence will induce them to be violent in reality.
Of course, if a child’s real world teaches him that violence is rewarded–as some brutal social and family realities do–then entertainment may reinforce the lesson. And positive associations with violence can be problematic for young people who are angry enough to behave irrationally or self-destructively. According to Stanford’s Donald Roberts, “A child will store up templates of media violence as sources of excitement, victory, or the relief of tension. If real life makes him angry, those templates can key in to his anger.” Roberts argued that our culture in general would benefit from more realistic presentations of the consequences of violence, citing anecdotal reports from emergency rooms of young men wounded in gunfights and knife fights who say, “I didn’t know it would hurt so much!”“A lot of people think media violence is fine when it’s cartoony and fun,” Roberts said, “that it shouldn’t be messy or disturbing. But it should be messy, at least some of the time. And when it isn’t, young people need to know that the reality is messy.”
Roberts also believes, however, in respecting the joy and emotional legitimacy of the fantasy. “My kids have always loved Looney Tunes–and so do I. But those cartoons do link pain and injury to fun. So every once in a while I’ll ask them, what do you think would really happen if a coyote fell off a cliff? Not right at the moment–I don’t want to be a killjoy. But later, when we’re all in the mood to think more about reality.”
Jib Fowles of the University of Houston, on the other hand, has cautioned against imposing adult viewpoints on children’s fantasies. “If they want to talk about what they see, that’s great. But sitting them down and making them talk about it can interfere with the workings of their imaginations.” According to Fowles, parents need to discuss only two aspects of TV content with their children: commercials and the news, because they both claim to represent reality but often distort it. Children learn quickly that fiction is a world apart, and they need to feel safe about entering that world.“Children are constantly being impacted by reality, often quite stressfully. Entertainment is the antidote to reality. Fantasy is therapeutic if it’s allowed to work incrementally over time, but that requires that it be allowed to remain fantasy. A parent-led discussion may be only another anxiety-provoking intrusion of reality.”
Dr. Fowles may have more faith in television than I do–and I think Dr. Roberts may worry a little more than necessary. But I believe they’re both right: respect children’s fantasies but encourage talking. The degree of each doesn’t matter much. We can’t go wrong if we approach them with love and acceptance.
It’s worth noting, too, that a bit of mentoring can be a good way for parents to relieve their own anxieties. Once I was visiting some friends whose twelve-year-old son was listening to “Stan,” Eminem’s song about a deranged rap fan who ends up killing himself and his girlfriend. My friend Susan grew more noticeably agitated as the song went on. She kept asking her son, “Do you like that song? Don’t you think that’s kind of dark? What do you like about it?” Jeff blew off every question with an increasingly annoyed, “Just let me listen! ” When it was finally over, Susan said, “Okay. One thing. You do know it’s not okay to lock your girlfriend in the trunk of your car, right?” Jeff answered, “Duh!” And everyone was happy.
Donald Roberts has stressed that the point of talking to kids is to inspire them to think, not to change their minds. Family communication breaks down not only when parents won’t listen or talk to their kids but when they can’t accept that their kids simply feel, and will go on feeling, fundamentally different about some issues. Whenever he discussed violence with his son Roberts was careful not to make it judgmental or confrontational.“I’d ask, what was it about, what did you think of this or that. I’d say, this movie shows violence as a good way to solve problems–what do you think of that? When I invite them to think and respond, they don’t have to resist what I’m saying in order to protect their turf.” After his son had children of his own, he disagreed with Roberts’s concerns about the grandkids playing with realistic toy guns.“But in disagreeing with me he quoted chapter and verse everything I’d told him when he was young. That was the important thing–that every talk we’d ever had was still in there, a part of his personal template of violence.”
Sometimes kids can lead us to interesting places when we trust their reactions rather than trying to shape or anticipate them. When Nicky was four years old, many of his friends started playing on a tree outside a children’s museum where they used to take classes. It was a perfect climbing tree–thick branches, low and almost level with the ground–and its deeply grooved trunk was home to countless bugs. I expected Nicky to love both the climbing and the bugs, but he was afraid. While his friends played around the tree, he’d drift away and play by himself. He wouldn’t say why he was afraid (“I just don’t want to play on the tree!” he’d say tearily), but Jennie and I were certain that he was afraid of falling, and it was costing him a joyful experience.
I decided to apply my ideas about power fantasies and read him some comics about the heroic lord of the trees, Tarzan. I brought him the most exciting version I knew, reprints of Tarzan newspaper strips from the 1930s, full of flashing knives and battles to the death. For a while he loved them. I began to imagine him racing to that tree and scaling its branches, pretending to be Tarzan. Then we came to a story in which the hero was poisoned by a witch doctor’s dart and collapsed to the ground. Suddenly Nicky said, “I don’t want to read Tarzan anymore!” I asked, “Don’t you want to see if he gets better?” He stuck his lower lip out, pushed the book away, and started to cry. “I don’t want to read Tarzan anymore!”
I wanted to throw the book away and never read him another violent story. At the same time I wanted to say what disappointed dads have been saying for generations: “Oh, come on! It’s just a story! What are you so afraid of?”
So I shut up for a minute. I let us both calm down, and then I looked at the book again and said, “It’s kind of scary, huh?”“Yeah.” “I’m sure glad Tarzan comes out okay.” “How do you know he’s okay?”“I read it before. He gets better and stops the bad guy.”“How does he get better from the poison?” “Do you want to see?” “How does he get better?” “It’s more fun to read it and see. But I promise he gets better.” I had to reassure him twice more before he’d let me read it, and then, just as Tarzan swallowed an antidote, he interrupted me agitatedly, “But poison makes you die!” “Where did you hear that?” I asked.“Peter told me!” he cried.“He told me the centipedes in the tree trunk were poison and poison makes you die! ”
Suddenly everything made sense. It wasn’t falling he was afraid of. It was the deadly centipedes that a seven-year-old classmate had invented to make the crevices in the trunk more exciting. Nicky had never been afraid of a bug before; in fact, he’d always prided himself on being the boldest of his friends at catching and holding them. But this talk of poison and death by an older boy who acted like he knew everything was too much for him. The pain and confusion of finding his own fears suddenly keeping him away from a tree full of wonderful bugs must only have amplified his shame and anxiety and made it harder to look at those fears.
He hadn’t reacted at all as I’d expected, but I was glad I’d brought the stories to him and that I hadn’t just put the book down when he first became upset. Now he had a chance for a reality check. I assured him that the kinds of centipedes we had around here were safe and that nothing would happen to him if he played on the tree. He still wasn’t ready to go back to the tree, but he loved looking at that scene in the book. For the next two weeks, he wanted to hear Tarzan every night. Then, suddenly, he said he wanted to read a fish book instead. We never went back to the ape man. But he did climb the tree.
When young people have problems with entertainment violence, parents may need to make a change in the way they use it. But an overreaction won’t help. As psychiatrist Edwin Cook said, “If my son watches an action show and hits his sister, then, definitely, it’s, guess what you don’t get to watch for two weeks. But the most aggressive kid in our neighborhood is the one who doesn’t get to watch TV at all, because he has no outlet.”
One family therapist with two sons told me, “Our older boy was usually mild and self-controlled no matter what he watched. But when his little brother watched cartoons he’d become too aggressive–squeezing the dog too hard and that sort of thing. We didn’t want to tell him that he couldn’t watch cartoons, because that would send the message that he wasn’t strong enough to handle his own feelings or reactions. So we told him that he could watch cartoons only if he could play without being too rough. We made it something to accomplish and told him we believed he could do it.” She encouraged her son to yell, beat on the couch, wrestle with his brother–but within limits. He had a lot of lapses, long stretches when action shows were off-limits, but he kept asking for new chances, and after several months he was handling himself well.“He felt good about that. It wasn’t an easy process for any of us, but in the end we were glad he’d done it.”
Sometimes children need us to help them break a cycle. A teenager disappearing from the rest of his life to play video games might need time limits or need the game console moved out of the bedroom. It’s important, however, to make clear to him that the problem isn’t him, or the entertainment that reflects his self-image and needs, but rather a behavior that you believe is making life harder for him. Let him know that you’re changing the rules of the household in order to help him bring himself, complete with tastes and fantasies, into the world as a happier and more effective person.
There’s far more to helping young people use their entertainment than simply minimizing its negative influences. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has stressed that the social and creative experiences a child has around entertainment can contribute to his development into a more complex and effective person.
Csikszentmihalyi developed the concept of “flow,” a confluence of emotion, cognitive function, social affect, and self-perception. In “high flow” states, people feel happy and learn quickly, present themselves appealingly to the world, and think well of themselves. In “low flow,” they feel depressed, have trouble processing information, chase the world away with their affect, and criticize themselves harshly. Csikszentmihalyi has found that teenagers’ highest flow states occur when they are deeply immersed in a demanding activity or socializing. Their lowest states occur during classroom lectures, when they feel bored, disaffected, passive, and trapped. Almost as low are the flow states they experience during solitary, passive entertainment, especially watching TV. The research indicates that teenagers who engage in less passive entertainment and more activities, whether individual or social, tend to do better in later life. “Activities that encourage high flow states make demands of us,” Csikszentmihalyi said, “force us to expand our personalities and learn new dimensions of ourselves. The difficulty is that the low flow state is so much easier to settle into and remain trapped in. The danger of television is that it is such a seductive medium. We may turn it on because there is something we truly want to learn from it, but once it’s on it is so easy just to sit there. Our mood lowers and lowers, and still we sit.”
He has pointed out, however, that the situation is more complex than TV-is-bad, activities-are-good. Research suggests that through the age of about twelve, children considered “talented” tend to watch more television than “less talented” children. From the age of about fourteen, that reverses; more talented teenagers watch less TV. “I believe this is because younger children use television as a source of ideas and fantasies,” he said. “They watch, they discover, and then they think about what they’ve discovered, play games with it, and draw pictures of it. Then, at a certain point, the medium becomes redundant. They’ve seen just about everything it has to offer, or they’ve discovered more fertile sources of ideas. The young people who continue to watch large amounts of television through adolescence tend to be using it as a relaxant or time killer, and so keep themselves in a low mood.”
The critical difference is in the viewer’s relationship with the material. Csikszentmihalyi has found that flow states can be quite high when a child is watching TV with a friend or family member and talking about what he sees. Even solitary watching can be active:“If a person watches a historical documentary because he wants to understand the topic, and he looks at it very closely, perhaps saying, ‘Wait, that isn’t true. Who produced this? What are they trying to put across?’ Or if he watches a basketball game and is wondering, why isn’t Kobe Bryant playing his best game? Or if he watches an action movie and tries to understand how the effects were achieved, or what’s going to happen next, or why the screenwriter made that decision. These are very active states, and they can be very valuable. Another activity, even a lecture or the opera, will be far less useful if we’re only going through the motions.”
In my work in the comic book business, I encountered a lot of young people caught spinning in fantasy: gobbling up superhero stories to ease their anxieties but never resolving their conflicts or taking authority over their real lives, so that they just spun to the next comic book or video game without ever moving on to more complex or demanding interests. Many of them spin right through adolescence and into adulthood, using the fantasy to resist lifting themselves up to a higher developmental level. One of the joys of the comics business, however, was the vast range of opportunities it gave fans to participate in organized fandom, interact socially with the creators of the comics, and get their own stories and art into print. I saw many young readers seize those opportunities to make more complex use of their adolescent fantasies and begin developing into happier and more interesting people.
Adults can encourage young people to build their fantasies into their social and creative lives–as long as we allow them to find their own ways of doing so. I’ve seen the downside of trying to push their creativity into channels that are more gratifying to us.
A boy named Adam in one of my seventh-grade workshops wore his pop-culture tastes as an obvious armor. This was two months after Columbine, and he was wearing a long black trench coat just like the killers wore, a fashion decision guaranteed to provoke adult reaction. He wasn’t a disruptive kid; he did his schoolwork, followed instructions, but gave no more to school than it asked of him. As his teacher said of him, “Adam just gave up on school.”
The page he drew for my Art and Story Workshop was a tribute to a rap group called the Insane Clown Posse, a group known for violent lyrics. That his enthusiasm for ICP was real, but the execution was perfunctory: angry, bad taste, quick and thoughtless. It bothered me. The kid obviously had brains and passion, could probably say something powerful if he tried, and I wanted him to see that. I told him that I thought what he’d done had some impact, and I could sense him opening up a little bit. Then I kept going. I told myself I was encouraging him to open up about what was bothering him, but what came out of my mouth was a critical, “I can tell you’ve got some very angry feelings–why don’t you do a story that has your feelings in it instead of just some tribute to a rap group?”
My tension was a reaction to his armor. The Columbine-style trench coat unnerved and annoyed me, as he had intended it to. Encouraging him to keep telling the stories he wanted might have opened him up, but I wanted to force a change in him instead of hearing what he wanted to say. I could see him closing up. I’d lost the kid.
Lynn Ponton told a story that played out differently. Joe was a teenage suburban boy who felt abandoned by his parents when they became overwhelmed by their own marital and professional issues. He spent his afternoons and evenings watching TV, sometimes alone, sometimes with a buddy or two. He became fascinated with old westerns, with their images of potent, self-contained maleness. Wanting to emulate his cowboy heroes, to be as tough and as free of loneliness as Lee Marvin or Jack Palance, he started drinking. His parents’ attempts to control his behavior came to nothing, until a frightening car accident left no doubt that something had to change. Dr. Ponton encouraged Joe’s parents to make changes that would open up communication in the family and encouraged Joe to deal directly with his drinking–but she also encouraged him to talk about the westerns he loved. Rather than viewing them as a problem to be controlled, she helped him go deeper into an understanding of the movies and what they gave him that his real life didn’t. He quit drinking and started thinking about what he wanted his life to be. Joe still watched his westerns, but he watched them increasingly with an eye to how they were made, what they meant, how he could use them creatively, socially, and intellectually. He decided to take a film class. The more he learned about filmmaking, the more he opened up to the world and the less he needed to play out the self-destructive fantasy he’d taken from the movies.
Entertainment has its greatest influence when it’s speaking to something that isn’t otherwise being addressed in a child’s life. It’s crucial to bring in a parent’s adult knowledge of the world without discounting the child’s very real perspective. It’s teaching first by modeling, then by mirroring, and then by communicating. We can model nonaggression, empathy, respect, a clear distinction between fantasy and reality, and the integration of aggression and other scary feelings. We can help young people learn to trust and take care of themselves by affirming their feelings and fantasies. We can mentor them in the subtexts and implications of their entertainment and encourage them to channel their fantasies productively.
Unfortunately, not all young people are lucky enough to have adults looking after them. Some of them have to work out their relationships with the media in the absence of adult guidance and in the face of adult hostility.