It Takes A Village, by Hillary Clinton: on Technology
Innovations make better parent-child connections at distance
Today’s electronic village has certainly complicated the challenge of parenting. When It Takes a Village was published, the Internet was largely the province of scientists; no one owned an iPod; and cell phones weighed as much as bricks.
Innovations are now coming at an exponentially faster pace, and media saturates our kids’ lives as never before. Many of these changes are for the good: when I was in college, a phone call home was rare and a flight home, a once-a-year luxury.
Now I know parents who see and speak to their kids every day by computer and video hookups, and I think how much Bill would have loved that when he was campaigning. But knowing that one third of kids under six have
TVs in their rooms, that the fashion industry is marketing its latest styles to preteen girls, and that predators stalk our children through the World Wide Web makes me thankful to have raised Chelsea in a less media-saturated time.
Source: 2006 intro to It Takes A Village, by H. Clinton, p. xiii-xiv
Dec 12, 2006
Introduced CAMRA to study how sex in media affects teens
A 2004 study found that teens who watch a lot of television with sexual content and more likely to initiate intercourse in the following year. Overexposure to highly-sexed television made kids act older--12-year-olds behaved like 14-year-olds.
A decade of new research confirms that heavy exposure to violent and sexually explicit media triggers unhealthy responses from boys and girls alike, regardless of race. But we don’t yet know the full effects of all this technology on our kids.
CAMRA, the Children and Media Research Advancement Act, which I introduced in the Senate, would coordinate and fund new research into the effects of viewing and using electronic media, including television, computers, video games, and the Internet,
on children.
Source: 2006 intro to It Takes A Village, by H. Clinton, p. xiv&305
Dec 12, 2006
Page last updated: Feb 24, 2019