Column:

Parents' Baby-sitting Station misguides youth

Children's shows sent the wrong message

By Charles Austin

Published April 20, 2009

Our generation's baby-sitters were all TV personalities. Thanks to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with help from viewers like you, our parents had an invaluable parenting aide at their disposal: PBS, or the Parents' Baby-sitting Station.

All of the children's programming on that network was frightening in ways that Vietnam never could have been. Our parents have no one but themselves to blame when they wonder why we make poor decisions, such as partying before exams or listening to Lil Wayne. But besides turning our generation into a bunch of Ritalin-addled, purple dinosaur-obsessed weirdos, PBS offered lessons for parents that could have saved us.

It started off innocently enough with Mr. Rogers. Our parents would see the front room of his house, they would see him change his shoes and then they would leave us in his care while they went off to do grown-up things. If they stuck around, they would have realized this is a full-grown adult man who lives alone, plays with puppets and has a massive toy trolley system running rampant through his house. His mailman was named Mr. McFeely for God's sake.

"Sesame Street" gave our generation the unfortunate idea that being undereducated is cool, thus spawning the careers of everyone from Soulja Boy to the ShamWow guy. Our parents thought it might teach us a valuable lesson to spend some time on the streets, but the streets changed us. The horrors of trashcan-dwelling, jobless, homeless freaks were too much for the 5-year-old mind to bear. We found even cookies could be addictive and drive men to insanity, and that hideous mutant birds regularly wandered the streets of the slums. All this hindered our ability to think straight, and to learn at a regular pace.

The cast of "Sesame Street" has been trying to learn the same 26 letters for decades now. The Count still hasn't learned how to multiply or divide. If our parents had paid attention to the plight of these mentally deficient characters, they could have pushed us harder to get a better education and achieve our dreams. We could be at Harvard right now, or Oxford or Yale, but instead we find ourselves slumming around this second-rate trash heap we call MU.

Once it was OK for mutated birds to take care of their children, our parents slipped further down the slope with "Barney and Friends." Barney deceived parents with a tenuous, inexplicable schoolhouse theme. Was that a school? Why was the teacher a doll that transformed into a carnivorous prehistoric beast? But since these questions didn't bother the parents of the kids on the show, why should they bother our parents?

We were finally lost for good. We learned that playing with dangerous beasts was cool and completely OK with our parents. So we started riding Razor scooters, skateboarding and doing cocaine off strippers' thighs in backwoods truck stops during tornadoes on the Sabbath.

As we've grown up, we've only seen it get worse for parents and children alike. The Teletubbies set gay rights back 20 years, and "Dora the Explorer" encouraged parents to leave their children alone with exotic boots-wearing animals.

I would say this is a warning for us when we have kids of our own, but that would be stupid. Our kids will just surf the Internet all day, and there's nothing objectionable there.