Issues raised by Newtown, pt 3 - Culture and relationships

This is the last in a 3-part series on the issues raised by the violence in Newtown, CT.  The first was on mental illness (http://amusingbeam.blogspot.com/2012/12/issues-raised-by-newtown-pt-1-mental.html), the second covered gun control (http://amusingbeam.blogspot.com/2013/01/issues-raised-by-newtown-pt-2-guns.html), and this one addresses our need to better handle the shifts in culture that our more connected world evokes.

Our changing culture
Our culture is changing in ways that make it easier for people to access materials with less social interaction. If I want to only read conservatives' posts, or jihadists', or Wiccans', or animal welfare rights advocates', or ...  I can comfortably do so.  I can watch snuff films without anyone knowing.  I can practice what it would be like to kill people in great detail by purchasing a video game, and I can order all of that online with relative anonymity.  Of course, I can also do all the neat stuff that we really love about our new culture.  I stream movies and TV shows via Netflix and Hulu, look up recipes and how-to videos, catch up on all the news, communicate with people of all stripes from most continents, etc.  Connectedness is usually a good thing.

But not always.  Most parents I know take their parenting roles seriously, but there are many that simply check out as long as the children are not inconveniencing them.  If a teenager comes home and holes up in his bedroom, many parents have few requirements for social interaction, for monitoring or mentoring, etc.

This is not a new phenomenon -- as my brother likes to remind me, when we were kids, after Saturday cartoons we were kicked out of the house until it was dark.  And it wasn't all milk and honey; there have always been people that preyed on children.  But there were simply fewer things for us to get into, and most of them had physical consequences.  The malicious kid was more likely to get caught because he left tortured animals as evidence.  People knew who the bullies were.  Parents could feel comfortable that they knew what their kids were exposed to because some person or book had to come into physical contact with the kids.

Parenting is harder and more important
That's just not true any longer.  Kids lead virtual lives that they often view as more important than their physical ones.  A generation ago, "grounding" someone to the house was a huge punishment.  Now, unless you "ground" them from electronics, many times a child won't bat an eye.  If they can text, FB, tweet, Skype, watch videos on YouTube or Netflix ... they are cool with that.  And if they have a phone, an iPad, a laptop, and a BluRay player that are all connected ....  It's simply harder now to be a good mentor and to gradually introduce concepts and situations to kids are they reach the intellectual, emotional, moral, and spiritual levels of maturity required to handle them.

It's much easier to opt out.  I've done it at times, and I know that I try really hard to be an attentive parent.
But what about the other kids?  What about the 7-year-old who plays the newest installment of Call of Duty all night, every night, while his parents fight in the living room?  Maybe he started as a toddler, sitting with his father while Dad played Vice City, and now little Jimmy watches him play Black Ops because the killing graphics are much better -- it's like really being there.

Woah, woah, woah, I can hear many of you saying.  Where is he going with this?  Here's where I'm NOT going -- government censorship.  See, I have a copy of Black Ops, and I like to play it.  The graphics really are cool.  And running from the cops in Vice City is quite fun, especially when they are at the higher levels and helicopters come after you.  I want to be able to continue playing these games, and the ones that follow.  Government censorship would restrict my happiness, probably with little benefit.

What may need to happen, though, is a cultural shift to acknowledging that these forces are a problem, and finding solutions to them.  Leaving kids to their own devices is often not the best thing.  Having an Internet-connected iPad as a "babysitter" is not anything close to the relatively innocuous benign neglect of sitting kids in front of a VCR to watch The Lion King for the 50th time.  The solution is not to try to shove the genii back in the bottle, of course -- for good or ill (mainly for good), everyone in the "First World" is connected now.  We need concerted efforts at several levels to help parents and children set and enforce age-appropriate behaviors and boundaries.  We need parents, siblings, teachers, and other important figures to serve as good, realistic mentors.

We need to acknowledge that the virtual world matters in the real world.  We need to continue to remind each other that the real world matters more.  And we all need to work on our relationships with each other.

Summary of thoughts
Here is a summary of this series on the issues raised by Newtown, CT:

1. Mental illness needs to be better addressed in this country, and we should recognize that we are all better off in doing so.
2. Gun policy needs to consider freedom, defense, and safety at several levels, remembering that we all want to be able to defend ourselves while not feeling we are likely to be victims of mass violence.
3. We need to acknowledge that our culture is shifting to allow easier access to all sorts of materials, and we need to build stronger relationships and find other cultural ways to address that shift.

A final thought: Kids die in horrific ways daily throughout the world, and we will probably never be able to completely stop that. The innocent lives taken in Newtown deserve to be considered and remembered ... as do the others.  Reducing pain and suffering by the innocent is a very worthy goal.  Government and the law are not always the best tools for achieving that goal, but sometimes they can help.  Let's keep trying to make it happen.

What do you think?