It is the responsibility of parents and parents alone to control what games their children possess. As far as chat room access, it is very simple to restrict or prohibit access to chatrooms on your computer. Create log in identities with password protection, and prohibit your children from accessing websites with questionable material. This is blaming other people for bad parenting.
Good post. That's my central theme always--that parents are responsible for their children and that we shouldn't "pass the buck" elsewhere.
PG and PG-13 movies are good examples. Many of them contain one sexual innuendo (or worse) after another, contain nudity, explicit violence and horrendous bad language. For little kids and 13-year-olds? What's wrong with these people? If that isn't peddling crap to children I don't know what is.
Those clothing stores that are geared toward teenage girls are full of provocative clothing and some very racy lingerie. *See below.
Or what about teenage magazines? Condom advice and how to "Dress Like Your Favorite Celebrity". *See above. Oh boy.
Video games that are rated Mature or for adults are bunched right in with the Sponge Bob games at the local video rental store or game store. A lot of them are in cartoon format, too. Kids get ahold of these. What kid can resist the temptation after seeing the "cool" commercials for the game on TV? It's a lucrative business.
And no matter how much you safeguard your computer at home, you can rest assured that the average kid can find a way to get on the internet, uncensored, at their friends' houses and at school or a library.
Yes, it is the responsiblity of parents to control what games their kids play and movies they see. But the parents who don't parent are really screwing up us parents who do. What do we do about these clueless parents?
Educate them maybe? I don't know.
But the rest of us have to take up the slack for these clueless parents by not making inappropriate stuff for kids so easy to access. And "the rest of us" includes the media, Hollywood and the music industry. No banning, no censorship, but better and smarter product placement when it comes to questionable subject matter. Yeah, it's a burden, but makes for a better quality of life and keeps us civil.