When I was a kid, my elementary school library had a big unabridged dictionary open on a pedestal. Once we learned what swearing was, we’d always look up the words we knew and giggle when we found them in there. It never disappointed.
Today the internet is for kids what that unabridged dictionary was for us, but in addition to swearing there’s also a lot of bizarre sex acts, videos of people getting murdered, Nazis, and Donald Trump. I’m not too sure how good I feel about our chances.
I’m not one of these “you kids today” people, generally, but I think there’s a pretty marked difference in the information available to children today vs. every generation preceding them. It concerns me as a parent (good lord four months in and I’m already that insufferable person it hurt so much to type that phrase) because as a person who got the internet in high school, I’m aware of the flimsiness of parental controls. I guess I can take some assurance from the fact that by the time my son knows how to bypass things like that, he’ll be old enough to have some idea of how things work and a value system that can accept or reject what he finds behind the gate. I have to equip him with some common sense and at some point let him loose upon the world and allow it to drench him in its sticky residue. But like, is it asking too much for him to make it through junior high without watching two women eat feces for money? Is that something Ward Cleaver ever worried about? Probably not, because he was naive enough to call his son Beaver.
Colin Fisher is many things to many people, but mostly he’s an actor and writer.
Bloggin Colin 