Parential role in children's explosure to R-rated movies - Essay Example

13 November Parental role in children’s exposure to R-rated movies Violence and nudity are amongst the most significant cultural issues of the West. Sex in the West is so rampant in the schools that hundreds of thousands of teenage girls become pregnant in US alone every year, and the number of teenage boys that have had sex once in the teenage before marriage is even larger. Media is fundamentally responsible for the cultivation of overt sex in the West. Parents should feel personally responsible to protect their children from seeing R-rated movies.

Some parents have little choice but to take young children to the adult-oriented movies that feature sexual content and violence. They do not have anybody at home to take care of the children. Whether or not the children are kept away from R-rated movies, they ultimately have to live in such a culture in which physical relationship across gender as well as within gender is not an uncommon thing. In such a culture, although keeping the children away from the sexually explicit material in the early childhood is suitable for their healthy psychosocial development, yet they are ultimately likely to experience a cultural shock when they would grow up and find overt expression of sexuality an extremely integral part of their culture.

Parents should not be allowed to take small children to R-rated movies. People are able to comprehend the issues of violence and nudity and react in a more responsible and rational manner to them as adults rather than as children. It is not just the sexual concerns that frustrate the little children, there are also many other side effects of this practice. Research has found immense likelihood of the teens that see R-rated movies to start smoking. The risk of starting to smoke in children between 10 and 14 years of age becomes 50 to 75 per cent less if they are completely refrained from watching R-rated movies than the risk for children who watch R-rated movies in this age.

Unfortunately, no more than 33.33 per cent of the young American teens follow such a level of restriction from seeing the adult material. “When watching popular movies, youth are exposed to many risk behaviors, including smoking, which is rarely displayed with negative health consequences and most often portrayed in a positive manner or glamorized to some extent. Previous studies have shown that adolescents who view movie smoking are more likely to begin smoking," (Leeuw cited in Gordon). A sense of respect and consideration for others should principally influence the parents’ decisions irrespective of whether the law allows the parents to take children with them to see R-rated movies or not.

Although many people object to such restrictions if they are not placed by the law, yet they should also consider and follow the standards of ethics which condemn people from displaying such public offense. The issue of whether or not to take the children to R-rated movies has less, if any, concern with the law. It is fundamentally an ethical issue in which the victims are children, and nobody can be more sincere to the children than their own parents. It is an individualistic decision in which parents have the right to choose what their children may see.

Irrespective of whether or not the law allows it, children must not be taken to R-rated movies. However, there is no need for the theaters to take stronger actions against the moviegoers who violate the Motion Picture Association of America's guidelines because it is the moviegoers’ individualistic decision and they will individualistically bear its consequences as well. It is not just the movies that display nudity and violence. Nudity in the West is omnipresent. There is no point placing legal restrictions on the movie audiences based on their age when there are so many television programs and cartoons in which nobody cares what the children might see.

Thus, if parents want to keep their children away from all this, they have to do full-time duty. This is actually what the parenting is all about. And if they are not quite concerned about it, there is no use of taking legal action against them for they would show their children nudity anyway. Concluding, parents should not take their children to see R-rated movies and should take measures to keep their children away from the display of any kind of violence or nudity anywhere. Exposure to violence and sexually explicit material before the right age is upsetting for the children as they don’t have the required level of maturity to deal with these issues sensibly.

The content is potentially harmful for them because of their inability to understand the underlying causes and theme of the nudity that is displayed in such films. Some guidelines that parents might choose before showing a movie to their children are; the movie should not be R-rated and the parents should see the movie themselves first before taking their children along to the cinemas. Works Cited: Gordon, Serena. “Watching R-rated Movies Ups Odds of Teens Smoking.” HealthDay Reporter. 7 Dec. 2010. Web. 13 Nov. 2011. .