The Perils of "Parental Guidance"
A mother recently told me the following story:
We told our son that he would be getting a new ten-speed bike for his thirteenth birthday. But he told us he wouldn't need a new bike. He declared that he wouldn't have time to ride it after he was thirteen, since he would be spending all his free time watching PG-13 movies!
Having read this far, I hope you're convinced of two things: First, it is extremely important to be aware of and to guide what your child sees on television, in videos, and at the movies. And second, it may be more difficult than you thought to shield your child from programs you consider inappropriate. Although you may think that your home, at least, is your castle, that castle has no moat and no fortress to protect it from the televised intruders that may disturb your children. Some of the intruders may seem harmless on the surface, but they conceal a seamier side. And to make things even more difficult, your children may be curious about these very intruders and may be eager to invite them in, despite your concerns.
I want to talk now about some practical problems of managing television in your home and selecting movies or videos for your children. Once you've decided that you want to be selective in what your children watch, how can you know in advance what will be in a program, video, or movie?
One way, of course, would be to watch every program or movie before your child sees it. Although this would perhaps be an ideal solution, no parent has the time to do it, and it's simply not feasible when we're talking about watching live television. So we have to depend on various forms of information that are provided to us. We have had movie ratings since the sixties, and now we have television ratings as well. Let's look at each of these in turn.
What You Should Know about Movie Ratings
When choosing a movie or a video for your child, the most obvious bit of information you have to go on besides its title is its Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating. Most parents are familiar with this system, which puts movies into four major categories: G for "General Audiences," PG for "Parental Guidance Suggested," PG-13 for "Parents Strongly Cautioned, " and R for "Restricted." A fifth rating, NC-17, "No One 17 and Under Admitted," was recently added, but it is rarely used.
The MPAA employs a committee of parents, who screen the movies and give them ratings by majority vote. A movie producer who is unhappy with a rating can reedit the film and resubmit it or submit the film to an appeals board, headed by MPAA president Jack Valenti, who developed the system in the 1960s.
Many parents take note of a movie's MPAA rating in making selections for their children, but these ratings have been widely criticized for being much too vague and too arbitrary. The rating system gives rough age guidelines regarding who should be allowed to see the movie, but it does not say why a movie received its rating. A PG rating, for example, indicates that many parents may consider some material unsuitable for their children, but it doesn't give any clue as to what's in the movie that makes it unsuitable.
Although the MPAA ratings do not indicate why a program received the rating it did, this information is available in other locations. Bowing to public pressure, the MPAA has provided content information for all movies that have received a rating of PG or higher since 1995. This information is usually not available in movie advertisements or on videocassette labels. However, it is often included in movie reviews, and it can be accessed through the MPAA's web site (http://www.mpaa.org), by subscription to the Motion Picture Rating Directory (at a cost of $160 per year), and by telephone in some cities.
As a researcher interested in this issue, and as a mother who finds it difficult to locate suitable movies for my own child to view, I thought it would be interesting to use the Motion Picture Rating Directory to determine the proportion of movies that were given the various ratings. What I found may surprise you, but it does explain why it's so hard to find movies that are obviously intended for young children. Out of some fourteen hundred movies that the MPAA rated in 1995 and 1996, only 3 percent were rated G. During that time, 14 percent were rated PG, 16 percent were rated PG-13, and a whopping 67 percent were rated R!
Because the G rating is so rare, many parents look to movies rated PG as the next best option. But without the additional content information, they are left in the dark in terms of what to expect. I became curious to know how many PG-rated movies simply had bad language, for example. I had heard members of the movie industry admit that very few producers actually want a G rating because they're afraid that only very young children will want to see their movie. (And as we'll see later in this chapter, their fears are well grounded!) Adding a few bad words is one way to avoid a G rating, and, looking at the reasons the MPAA gave for all the movies that were rated PG in 1995 and 1996, my colleagues and I found that more than one-fourth of them (26 percent) had bad language only. Many parents feel that these bad words are the lesser of the three evils that are prevalent in movies (language, sex, and violence). If only the rating would tell parents which were the ones with language!
And how helpful is the PG rating in letting us know what to expect in terms of other types of content? In addition to those with bad words, 12 percent of PG movies had violence only and another 26 percent had both violence and bad language. Eighteen percent of PG-rated movies had no violence, no sex, and no bad language. Most of these were described as having "thematic elements" that were somehow inappropriate for young children. So it's quite clear that the PG rating tells parents virtually nothing about the content to expect in a movie. If they can't access the MPAA's web site or find the content reasons in another location, they are left almost completely in the dark.
There's another little-known problem with the PG rating that I came upon in my analyses. When my colleagues and I looked at the content of a random sample of movies shown on television, there was only a whisper of a difference between movies rated PG and those rated PG-13. It was then that I was reminded that the PG-13 rating was not introduced until 1984.This rating was added in response to children's fright reactions to such movies as Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Before that time, movies that now would be given a PG-13 rating were probably rated PG. Did you know, for example, that Jaws -- the movie cited so many times as causing long-term fears -- is rated only PG? Certainly that movie deserves more of a caution than "Parental Guidance Suggested." But it was released before the PG-13 rating existed. So, in addition to other problems with the MPAA ratings, it's important to find the date of a movie's release when interpreting the PG rating. If a PG-rated movie was released before 1984, its content may bring an especially upsetting surprise.
Can't We Even Trust the G Rating?
The G rating doesn't necessarily help us either. As one mother who answered a recent nationwide survey of ours put it:
As of now, I do not trust the MPAA's ratings at all. Not even G.
The G rating is not necessarily safe for young children. The label "General Audiences: All Ages Admitted" appears comforting to most parents, although the explanation of the rating supplied by MPAA president Jack Valenti hedges a bit:
This is a film which contains nothing in theme, language, nudity and sex, violence, etc. which would, in the view of the Rating Board, be offensive to parents whose younger children view the film. The G rating is not a "certificate of approval," nor does it signify a children's film.
The explanation goes on to say that a G-rated movie has no nudity or sex and that "the violence is at a minimum."
If there's one type of movie where the G rating especially falls down on the job, it's the animated feature. Although most of these fairy tale or adventure movies are rated G, many of them have a good deal more than minimal violence. For example, the G-rated Beauty and the Beast is intensely violent, both in the vicious attacks by the wolves on the Beast, and in the fierce, deadly battle between the Beast and the villain Gaston. In a story in the Boston Globe, one mother complained that the wolves in this movie had caused her three-year-old daughter to become terrified of dogs, and that her daughter was still afraid of dogs three years later.
Although it may seem shocking to those who have always believed cartoon features to be designed for young children, my own research and the frequency of parents' reports of their children's distress lead me to conclude that many of them are too scary for many children below the age of six. Some parents who agree with me on this have confided that many of their friends think they're crazy. If animated features can't be rated G, what use is there in the G rating at all?
This last question brings up a very good point. Animated fairy tale and adventure films seem to be rated on the basis of their target market -- children -- rather than the effects they have on children. A G rating is not an indication of content. And it is not very helpful to parents.
Just Let Us Know What's in the Show
To summarize some of the problems with movie ratings: We can't tell what's in the movie from the rating alone; we can't interpret PG ratings that were issued before 1984 (when PG-13 was introduced); and we can't trust the G rating to be safe for preschoolers. MPAA ratings reflect what a committee of parents think would be offensive to other parents. They do not reflect any expertise in the field of child psychology or knowledge of the impact of the media on children. These ratings are not helpful in predicting the effects a movie will have on your child.
What would help us make viewing decisions for our children? The answer is, an honest indication of what is in the movie. If a rating simply indicated the movie's contents, parents could ask themselves, "Is my child ready to watch this?"
Take another striking example of a G-rated animated feature, Bambi. In the middle of this classic movie, the sweet young fawn's mother is shot and killed by a hunter. When I went to a matinee where Bambi was playing, I heard interesting conversations all around me. After the hunter's shot rang out, and while Bambi was searching in vain for his mother, I heard many children asking the same question: "What happened to Bambi's mother?" I also noticed that different parents were answering in different ways -- some were being honest, but others didn't want to communicate the brutality of the truthful answer. If you take your preschooler to Bambi, be prepared for your child to suddenly confront the thought of you dying. I often hear reports of preschoolers' problems with Bambi, yet it's hard to get the message out that it's better to wait with this movie. What could sound more innocent than a G-rated cartoon named Bambi? Wouldn't information about what happens in this movie serve you better than the rating?
There are scary scenes in many animated fairy tale and adventure features. In addition to the recurrent theme of the loss of the mother, there are a multitude of monstrous and grotesque villains. There are also many disturbing character transformations, and there's plenty of intense violence. This is the stuff of nightmares for two- to five-year-olds. These films are often fun for slightly older children, perhaps six or seven and up, but they can be too much for younger ones to take. My advice is not to take the safety of any so-called children's movie for granted, but to err on the side of caution if you have any doubts.
I want it to be clear that this recommendation is not an attack on the entertainment industry; nor is it intended to single out any specific producers of children's movies. This is information for parents who are seeking enjoyment -- not nightmares -- for their children. All children are not equally sensitive to this type of material, but enough of them respond badly that discretion is warranted.
Members of the movie industry may be alarmed at the advice I'm giving because they may see it as potentially cutting into the audience for their G-rated movies. But I am not advising you to boycott these movies; simply wait until your child is old enough to see them without trauma. Who knows, if a child's first experience with the movies is a fun thrill rather than a series of sleepless nights, maybe that child will become a more avid consumer of movies in the long run!
Making the Most of Movie Ratings
In spite of all the problems with movie ratings, they do provide some information. Most R-rated movies and a high proportion of those rated PG-23 have enough sex, violence, and bad language to eliminate them as an option for young children. And you can use the MPAA's web site to get some idea of the reasons why recent movies received their ratings. To me, the best use of the MPAA ratings is to rule out movies with more restrictive ratings (unless you have viewed them yourself, and know the rating to be wrongly applied). And don't be reassured by the lower-level ratings of G or PG without getting further information about the content of the movie. (A video guide might be a good place to start.) A table in the appendix summarizes important features of the movie ratings.
What About TV Ratings?
Although there are many difficulties in selecting movies and videos for your children, the stakes are even higher for television because TV programs come into your home automatically. For all the channels your set receives, the programs are there at the touch of a remote. Unless some program-blocking technology is in place, or you are monitoring your TV at all times, their availability in your home is out of your control.
Fortunately, we are entering a new era, one in which parents are being given new tools to help them screen out certain types of programs. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 required new television sets to be manufactured with an electronic device known as a V-chip within a specified period of time. The V-chip reads a code or rating that is embedded in each program as it is transmitted. Parents decide which rating levels are inappropriate for their child, and by flipping a switch, they ensure that no programs with those ratings will be shown on their TV unless they themselves choose to override the blocking.
The concept seems simple enough, but the complicating and controversial part is how programs are rated. Someone has to give each program a rating that parents will find useful in deciding whether or not a program should be blocked.
The Tug-of-War over the TV Ratings: Parents vs. the Television Industry
In February of 1996, shortly after the Telecommunications Act was passed, the leaders of the broadcast, cable, and film industries agreed to come up with a rating system to apply to their programs. Many of these leaders were reluctant to provide ratings because of their fears that the ratings might lower viewership for their programs and ultimately reduce their profits. But with the threat that someone else might create a system if they did not, they set up the Ratings Implementation Group headed by MPAA president Jack Valenti. Because of the volume of programs that would need to be rated, it was assumed from the start that producers or distributors would rate their own programs rather than having a committee determine the ratings. Unfortunately, under Valenti's leadership, it was also assumed that the TV ratings would be based on the movie ratings that he developed.
Although Valenti's group publicly acknowledged that ratings were for parents, many people, myself included, were concerned that economic forces in the industry would outweigh parents' wishes in determining the type of rating system that would emerge. So, in the summer of 1996, I joined with the National PTA and the Institute for Mental Health Initiatives (IMHI) to do a nationwide survey to find out what parents wanted in a rating system. We explored whether parents preferred the MPAA approach, which gives age guidelines but doesn't specify content, or a content-based approach, which indicates the level of sex, violence, and coarse language in a program, but gives no age recommendations. This second approach is similar to a system that has been used for years on the cable channels HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax.
We sent our survey to a random sample of the PTA's national membership, and the results came back from every state in the country. These parents voted overwhelmingly for information about content: 80 percent of them chose a content-based system, while only 20 percent felt the system should give age recommendations. Our findings were echoed in two other national polls in the fall of 1996 and in several others after that.
Although the entertainment industry engaged in a very public process of consulting with researchers and child advocates while developing their rating system, they ignored our unanimous recommendations for a content-based system and came out with the TV Parental Guidelines in December of 1996, based primarily on the MPAA ratings. Instead of G, PG, PG-13, and R, the new ratings were TV-G, "General Audience"; TV-PG, "Parental Guidance Suggested"; TV-14, "Parents Strongly Cautioned"; and TV-MA, "Mature Audience Only." The new rating system also had two other levels, to be used for what the industry dubbed "children's programming": TV-Y for "All Children" and TV-Y7, "Directed to Older Children." The rating system, which is designed to be applied to all programs with the exception of news and sports, was adopted by all channels except PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) and BET (Black Entertainment Television). PBS said the ratings as designed were uninformative; BET objected to the concept of ratings per se.
Problems with the Industry's Rating System
As if the fact that American parents overwhelmingly preferred a system of content indicators rather than age guidelines wasn't sufficient evidence to force the TV industry to change its mind, there were other problems with the TV Parental Guidelines as well.
The TV rating system provided no information at all about why a program got its rating. At least with the MPAA ratings, parents now have the web site available to find out about content and we have the assurance that a committee of our peers has determined the rating a movie received. But with the TV Parental Guidelines, not only were no parents involved in determining a program's rating, none were involved in the appeals process either. In fact, no one outside the industry was permitted to sit on the Monitoring Board for the new rating system. So much for serving parents!
But the report card was even worse for the TV Parental Guidelines: Guess how this type of rating affects children!
"The cooler the movie, the higher the rating."
This spontaneous comment came from a ten-year-old girl who participated in research my colleagues and I conducted for the National Television Violence Study, an independent violence monitoring project funded by the cable TV industry. The aim of the research was to determine whether putting warning labels or restrictive ratings on violent shows would discourage children from viewing them, or whether the attempt would backfire and make children more interested in seeing them -- the forbidden fruit effect. In the study this girl participated in, which involved children between the ages of five and eleven, a child and his or her parent selected the programs the child would see. Some of the program choices the pair was given had the label "Contains some violence. Parental discretion advised." Other choices involved movies that were rated PG-13: "Parents Strongly Cautioned."
What was most interesting about this study was the difference between how parents and children talked about the programs' labels. Almost all the comments the parents made about the programs with restrictive labels were negative. In contrast, more than half of the children's comments about these programs ranged from favorable to downright enthusiastic. For example, one child said, "PG-Ratings 13. Choose that one!" Another blurted out, "Parental discretion advised -- that's awesome!" These cautionary labels really added to the programs' allure for many children.
My colleagues and I also did some studies to find out how these ratings affect kids who make viewing decisions in the absence of their parents. We found that boys were more interested in a program when it was labeled "parental discretion advised" than when it came without a label. We also found that children between ten and fourteen were much more interested in a movie when they were told it was rated PG-13 or R and much less interested in the same movie if they thought it was rated G. Among younger children, those who were the most aggressive or who liked to watch TV the most also found programs with restrictive ratings more enticing. On the other hand, content-based systems like the one used by HBO and Showtime did not attract children to programs with higher violence levels.
These studies show that ratings like those the TV industry developed are the most likely to attract our children to the programs we want to shield them from! Telling a child "you're too young for this program" and telling parents "protect your child from this" makes a program much more tantalizing. Simply providing information about the content, the way HBO and Showtime do, is not nearly as provocative.
Unfortunately then, rather than helping you, TV ratings may very well make it harder for you to protect your child from inappropriate programs. Many parents have reported this problem, including a mother who said that her ten-year-old son had suddenly become so fascinated with anything rated TV-14 that it was causing immense conflict in her family. Another mother told me that her fourteen-year-old daughter, who had previously accepted her parents' restriction on NYPD Blue, suddenly insisted she was entitled to see it after it began being labeled TV-14. So it seems that age-based ratings can cause problems with children both under and over the recommended age minimum. At least the V-chip may allow parents to block a program without calling their child's attention to the forbidden fruit. But it may be a long time before most TV sets are equipped with blocking technology.
The Compromise Rating System: The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated
The TV industry's rating system met an unprecedented throng of opponents, who joined together in the spring and summer of 1997 to pressure for changes. The National PTA led a coalition of public health and child advocacy groups, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, the Center for Media Education, and the Children's Defense Fund. These groups relentlessly lobbied Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), asking them to insist on a better system. The television industry countered that all the criticism was coming from these "special interest groups," as they called them, and maintained that most parents were satisfied with the ratings the industry was providing. However, after comments to the FCC and a congressional hearing in Peoria, Illinois, showed how widespread parents' opposition was, the industry started to negotiate with the child advocacy groups, and most channels agreed to a compromise rating system in July of 1997. At that time, PBS agreed to use the new system and BET maintained its refusal to rate its programs. NBC refused to adopt the compromise system and continued to use the age-based ratings.
The compromise system, which began being applied to programs on October 1, 1997, keeps the original age-based system but adds various content indicators to help parents determine what, specifically, caused the program to receive its rating. The upper three ratings (TV-PG, TV-14, and TV-MA) may now be accompanied by a V for violent content, an L for coarse language, an S for sexual content, and a D for sexual dialogue or innuendo. For children's programs, an FV may be added to the TV-Y7 rating to indicate that the program contains "fantasy violence." The amended television rating system is shown in the appendix.
The fact that the industry budged at all -- Jack Valenti had warned critics that he'd see them in court "in a nanosecond" if they tried to force any changes -- is a great victory for parents. This is one instance where parents' voices were heard, and we should all feel indebted to the child advocacy groups and to members of Congress, particularly Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Senator John McCain of Arizona, who kept the pressure on the television industry. The additional content information will undoubtedly be helpful.
Problems with the Amended System
The bad news is that the compromise rating system keeps some unfortunate features of the original system because the industry adamantly refused to give up on its age-based rating structure. First, the fact that the age guidelines have been retained makes it likely that the forbidden-fruit effect will continue, making restricted programs more tantalizing to many children. Second, the new system does not require full disclosure when some types of content are less controversial than others within the same program. Under the compromise, the overall rating of a program is determined by its most intense content. In other words, if a program has "strong coarse language," it is rated TV-14- L; if it has "moderate violence," it is rated TV-PG-V. But if it has both of these elements, it is still rated TV-14-L, and no mention is made of its violent content. What this means is that if a movie is rated TV-14 or TV-MA, it may have lower levels of sex, violence, or coarse language that are not explicitly indicated by a content letter.
Another problem with the compromise is that the industry insisted on using euphemisms rather than describing content clearly and accurately. Although the parent groups had argued for using a V for violence, an S for sex, and an L for coarse language, the industry insisted upon adding D for situations in which sex is talked about but not shown. They also balked at using the word "violence" to refer to the mayhem that goes on in many children's shows, such as Power Rangers or The X-Men. Instead, the amended system uses the letters TV to refer to "fantasy violence." Any intense violence that occurs in children's programs is labeled fantasy violence, whether the violence is indeed of the impossible variety or whether it is quite realistic but simply appears in a children's show.
Finally, it remains to be seen whether producers will assign ratings accurately and consistently to their programs.
The compromise system is complicated, but at least it permits parents to receive some information about the type of content in a program and, importantly, the agreement added five representatives of child advocacy groups to the Monitoring Board of the rating system. If television producers assign ratings arbitrarily or irresponsibly, there are some members of the monitoring group who are beholden to families rather than to the television industry's bottom line.
Alternative Rating Systems
There are a number of groups that are dissatisfied with the TV Parental Guidelines and that have developed their own systems for rating television content. One of these groups, the Children's Television Consortium, is especially concerned that the television industry's system is not informed by the findings of medical or psychological research. They have developed a system called Our Kids TV (OKTV), based on what is known about the effects of television on children. This system will be especially helpful to parents who are concerned about their children's fright reactions because it has a separate set of ratings dealing with horror, based heavily on my research about what frightens children at different ages.
One handicap of the OKTV system is that unless the raters are provided with advance information about the content of specific episodes of programs, they may lack the important details necessary to rate them accurately. Another problem involves the public's access to the ratings: Newspapers are unlikely to provide alternative ratings in their program listings. Moreover, the television industry is not likely to embed such ratings in their program transmission, rendering them unreadable by the Vchip. Nevertheless, because these ratings will undoubtedly be much more useful to parents than the industry's system, it may well be worthwhile to take the extra effort to locate them. When the OKTV system is up and running, you will be able to obtain information about it through the web site of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (http://www.aacap.org).
This chapter has suggested how movie and television ratings may be of value and has also pointed out some of their deficiencies. Now it's time to see how best to put what you've learned in this book into day-to-day practice. After all, it's up to you to manage your child's TV viewing and make the best of ratings and new technologies. It is also important that you speak up and be sure your opinions and needs are listened to by the larger community.