“BLAME THE MEDIA”
By Emily McBurnie
I’ve started watching a TV show set in the early 60’s. It is about advertising men in NYC,but focuses on parenting in that time as well.
Sure, I cringe at the heavily pregnant women smoking and drinking, and the way the kids are left alone in bed sleeping while Mum takes the dog out for a walk. Then there are the kids jumping around from the back seat of the Cadillac to the front bench while the car is moving (no seat belts let alone car seats).
But that was the 50’s/60’s and that’s what our grandparents did in those days. How did our parents turn out? Were they on the nightly news being kidnapped or hurt? The majority of us will answer “no”.
Apart from the effects of the smoking, that we all know will kill you, children were not coddled or protected from the outside world like they are today. Shock horror, they were spanked for acting up; they ate what they were given and ran on the road.
Why?
Compare this to now, and a lot has changed. I find myself asking “Why?” and can only admit I am part of the problem.
You see, I worked in newsrooms for the past 10 years as a journalist/news anchor.
Good feeling stories will always be pushed aside for a gruesome murder, especially if it involves a child in some way. Police chiefs, once men/women of few words, are now hungry for the spotlight, and due to advertising factors, that one-hour of news has to be filled.
As a journalist you dig around to find the most “shocking” story, something that will make the mums & dads chat about in the park. I feel this is a big reason why we have changed the way we parent today. The gruesome stories were around in the 50’s or 60’s but they just weren’t reported. There were so many restrictions back then on what a journalist could report. Out of sight, out of mind, so to speak.
I have some advice for parents today
Don’t believe EVERYTHING you see/read; it is often distorted to some degree. Turn the news off, put the paper down and get out with your kids! Take them “off the leash.
Let them run into the neighbors yard and play on the road and climb threes (within reason, of course) and let them develop their own gut feeling about bad characters.
If you smoother them too much they will no be able to trust their own judgments and tune into their own sense of wrong or right. They also watch the news when you are watching it. And if that’s all they see, their world will truly be distorted and a scary place to bet.
Emily McBurnie is a journalist/news anchor who works in film in Toronto. She has two girls, aged 4 and 1 and never misses a day going outdoors with the kids, even in a snowstorm!
