Thursday, November 18, 2010

Destruction of Parent-Child Relationships on TV

Caroline Rand
Ms. Clark
English 101
November 18, 2010

Destruction of Parent-Child Relationships on TV

The culture today includes violence, profanity, promiscuity and poor moral everywhere you look, partly due to the rapid increase of these things in the media. The media influences the behavior of a few but effects the lives of many. People in the modern world today are desensitized to many shocking aspects in the media and have become immune to the awful moral lessons that are being portrayed forms of media, concentrating on Animated TV shows. Animated TV shows offer humor, entertainment, and the occasional poor moral lesson. These negative lessons may not be extremely prevalent due to the overpowering humor, but the consumer is subjected to absorb this lesson unconsciously. This has caused an increase in children and teenagers problems with their relationships with adults all over our society. “Popular culture also helps to poison relationships between parents and children” which leads to kids making poor choices. (Medved 147). “No notion has been more aggressively and ubiquitously promoted in films, popular music, and television than the idea that children know best- that parents are corrupt hypocritical clowns who must learn decency and integrity from their enlightened offspring” (Medved 147). The traditional values of close parent-child relationships, family, and trust, have been torn into pieces by continuous examples and portrayals of bad values in the media. Family Guy, one of the most popular animated television shows of our time, is a prime example of such a view. The messages that are cast out are not just about the relationships between parent and child, but they are about the general relationships between kids and adults. Medved notes that adults are often shown as evil, damaging, and “toxic” while the kids are the “enlightened”, intelligent, responsible and more powerful than any adult they cross in their lives. (Medved 147-160). While teenagers watch this show Family Guy, they are getting “useless, perhaps even damaging advice from the parent figures” (Medved 148). Family Guy is an extremely good show for the sake of entertainment, but the title itself offers the first issues with the lack of moral. Family Guys’ theme song that opens each episode is ironic in the way that it states “It seems today, that all you see, is violence in movies, and sex on TV… But where are those good old fashion values…. On which we used to rely?! Luckily there’s a family guy!”. Here, the song has the same argument that I am currently making, that there are too many bad values shown throughout all the media. Ironically, the title and the song do not illustrate to be true with the content that the show holds. In this animated show, Stewie, the one-year-old genius and evil baby has I life goal that is to kill his mother Lois because in his eyes, she is the source of all evil and he is a genius and believes murder to be the only solution. This is dangerous to the viewers because it shows them that kids want to kill their parents if they are annoying them and it is okay to use violence to illustrate your opinion. Also, there is never any punishment for Stewie when he uses violence against Lois or talks bad to her. This tells the viewers over time that this may be the same for them. Also, as a parent watching this show, it may eventually set the norm of what to expect from their children and how they should not act against their child if they are being rude or violent towards them. However, the Stewie-Lois relationship is not the main adult-child issue. The relationships that threaten the viewers’ moral the greatest is the relationships that each family member has with Meg Griffin, otherwise known as the families “punching bag” (“About the Show”). Meg is a seventeen-year-old “frumpy” girl who is socially awkward and does not fit in anywhere, especially her family. She is constantly put down and humiliated by her family members. For example in one episode Meg says “I just want to kill myself, I’m going to go upstairs and eat a whole bowl of peanuts.” Then her parents, Lois and Peter stare in silence until Meg exclaims “I’m allergic to peanuts” and Lois and Peter continue to stare. Meg then says “You don’t know anything about me!” and runs upstairs and Peter says to Lois, “Who was that guy?” (Meg Griffin Quotes). This shows a complete disconnect between parent and child. It shows the teenage or child viewer that it is humorous if parents talk to children like that so it is acceptable. It shows the parents that everyone will find you entertaining and fun if you treat your child in a distant and mean manner. Obviously, this is not the way children should be treated by their parents or our society today is set up for failure. This show is known to be a “parody of modern pop culture” and that these events in the show are to be looked at as humorous. Yes, the vulgarity and bad relationships are constructed by the creators of the show and are not real, but it does in fact slowly affect the consumer into believing that acting in an unpleasant way towards each other is accepted by society. Another thing that attributes to the not so great concern over this issue is that the bad messages are overshadowed by the face pace, exciting, and crazy plot that is needed to maintain the viewers attention. Television started as a center of where families could come together to watch shows that would enhance their morals and parents did not have to hide their children’s eyes from such poor values. The point is not that the parents should completely cut off their child’s viewing privileges, but both parent and child should be aware of the poor messages being illustrated so they can veer away from being influenced by them. This is the key to stopping the destruction of healthy parent-child relationships. Parents must take the first step and not be ignorant towards these messages. They should counteract the values their children are seeing on TV with positive values shown in their own home. These anti family messages that the media is casting out all over the society are dangerous and both parents and children must be aware. As Medved puts it, the media’s “antifamily messages-… may not make it impossible to raise decent kids, but they certainly make it harder than it has to be” (Medved 157).

Works Cited
“About the Show” Family Guy. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. ..
“Family Guy”. Wikipedia. 18 Nov. 2010. .
Medved, Michael. Hollywood VS. America. Harper Perennial: New York. 1992.
Meg Griffin Quotes. Family Guy. Fox. 18 Nov. 2010.
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