Don't Eat/Read/Watch that Junk!

I'm reading a really interesting book right now called "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America."

I haven't finished it, but I'm at the part where kids in schools are burning piles of comic books.

It's all about how comic books got accused of fomenting all sorts of misdeeds in the nation's youth in the middle of the last century. And while reading this, something occurred to me: media is like food.

I love media. I love movies, and TV shows, and books, and radio, and DVDs, and the Internet. And I would argue that just about everybody likes food.

Problem is, there's food that's good for you and there's food that's bad for you. We expend enormous amounts of energy teaching our kids how to eat. What to eat, how much, what not to eat, Sesame Street songs about "any time foods" vs. "sometime foods,"... etc. Sometimes this gets to the point of encouraging the opposite of what we want in eating behavior when we try too hard or treat food like a reward.

Well, media is the same way. There are things that are appropriate for different ages. There are things that one kid likes and that terrify another kid. But most of all, we have to learn how to be consumers of media the same way we learn to consume food. Not all of it is good, and you need some basic judgment to know what you are dealing with.

To help with this, I recommend this website: Commonsense Media. It's a place where you can get reviews of new movies, find out what's going on with pop culture, and just be a savvy consumer so you can teach your kids to do the same.

It's just plain dumb to think burning piles of comic books, or records, or whatever is going to solve anything. The minute you tell one person what can or cannot be said, that's a crack in our free society. But you can be smart about media "nutrition" and help kids have a healthy relationship with it all.