COMMENT
If you have young children and television, you have lost control of their sex education and their exposure to sexual material.
Popular weekday early-evening TV programmes such as Friends (which has screened as early as 6.30pm), Shortland Street, Malcolm in the Middle, and The Simpsons often contain explicit references to sex.
Also, promotions for adult programmes scheduled later at night are often shown during the afternoon or early evening. These can include brief but explicit scenes of sexual behaviour.
Then there's the full-on erotic dancing which is part of so many music videos screening at any old time on C4.
Apart from programme content and promotions, advertisements often contain explicit sexual references. A few examples among many are advertisements for erectile dysfunction, the clothing store one in which an amorous young woman finds her boyfriend's folded socks tucked in a place you wouldn't expect them to be, and the current ad for a threesome in a mini.
None of these programmes or advertisements is likely to be offensive in itself to reasonably broad-minded adults. But it is completely inappropriate to screen them at a time when young children are very likely to be part of the viewing audience.
TV management would probably argue that it is a parent's responsibility to monitor children's viewing. They would say that parents should preview programmes or watch them with their children so they can explain adult content, change the channel, or turn the set off if necessary.
However, this option is simply not realistic. Not many parents would be willing or able to sit through their children's entire evening viewing with remote in hand in the role of ever-watchful censor.
You would hope that programmers would show a degree of social conscience and decide not to show material with explicit sexual references until after a time when young children are likely to have gone to bed.
Or, in the absence of a social conscience, maybe early-evening programmes that contain explicit sexual references could carry the same warning about sexual or violent content that later ones do. That would at least give parents the chance to change channel beforehand.
TV3 used to run a little announcement at about 8.30pm saying the following programmes were not intended for children to watch. That seemed like a sensible and responsible thing to do, which is probably why it stopped doing it.
Regrettably, it's probably unrealistic to expect any radical change in programming policy for the sake of children, so it seems to me that parents need to deal with this problem for themselves.
Some options are to:
* Pre-record programmes that you know are suitable for your children for replay at their preferred viewing times.
* Play suitable videos in preference to broadcast programmes.
* Radically restrict your child's viewing to programmes that you know contain no sexual references.
* Restrict viewing times so that you can sit with your child and make sure that the content is suitable, and either explain or switch off if necessary.
* Educate your children early in the basics of sex, so that you have a frame of reference in which to explain sexual material.
* Ban TV.
The last option is my personal favourite, because so much of what is shown on television is simply junk food for the mind: low in nutritional value, addictive, and decidedly unhealthy when taken in large quantities.
There are two things that bother me about all this.
The first is that our tolerance for children's exposure to sexual material has been raised remarkably over the past few decades, probably because sexual references in the visual and print media are everywhere.
For example, how about those huge billboards promoting some new TV programme with the caption in huge letters: "Want a root?"
No normal family exposes its children to adult sexual references or behaviour; if it did, it would be regarded as abusive. Yet as a society we thoughtlessly expose our children to this kind of material.
A decade or so ago, if a pre-school child was referred to me exhibiting explicitly sexual behaviours, my first thought would be that the child had probably been sexually abused.
Now, because of the availability of such sexually explicit material on videos, DVDs, and the internet, such behaviour in children is much more common.
It can no longer be assumed that a child who behaves in a precociously sexual way has been sexually abused.
As a parent, you should be concerned by that trend.
The second thing that bothers me is the invisibility of young children on the radar screens of programmers and advertisers.
It's as if they don't exist, and as if any collateral damage they may sustain as the result of broadcast material is of no consequence as long as the programme or advertisement has an impact on the target audience.
This is the more worrying point, because of the power of commerce in our society. I suppose the needs of business and marketing have always overridden consideration of social impact, and that is serious enough.
But when we ignore the welfare and well-being of children, we are in trouble as a society.
The inescapable reality for parents is that market forces rule TV. By definition, market forces and social responsibility are incompatible.
This means that if you are serious about protecting your children from exposure to sexual material, you must either be prepared to be a full-time censor while they watch TV, or act decisively to limit or ban their early-evening viewing.
Are you brave enough?
* Dr Glen Stenhouse is an Auckland child psychologist.
<i>Glen Stenhouse:</i> Sex on screen a challenge to parents
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