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<title> Parental Responsibility - For Better or For Worse? </title>
"How to protect a child from rude shocks on the tube?", Ginia Bellafante asks herself in her article Locking Out Violence, TIME Magazine, July 24, 1995. The potentially detrimental effects of television have been studied and debated for the past forty years. More recently, the United States Congress mandated that by February 1998, all television sets sold in the U.S. must be equipped with V chips. The V chip is an antiviolence computer chip that reads encoded signals from broadcasters. Through a rating system parents can lock out programs that previously has been identified as containing a certain level of violence. "This is not censorship. This is parental responsibility.", says President Clinton is Bellafante's article. Parental responsibility is needed, but do we see the core of the problem?
	The first thing that comes to mind is that television is made scapegoat for problems caused by society's larger, more intractable problems. Among these are poverty, drugs and the break-down of families. If children are not provided with safe family life conditions, people around them that love and care for them, does it then matter what is on the TV? Some might say that the easiest target is blamed. Reality has the deepest impact on people and controlling what children are watching on television is nothing but putting polish on a rough surface. 
	Secondly, the parents who will actually use the V chip are probably not the same as the ones who would need to involve themselves in their children. The pace of today's society often demands both parents working, if both parents are present, that is. After a hard day's work, television is probably seen as a baby-sitter to many parents. This leaves "the tube" to teach children various skills previously attached to parenthood, including moral issues. A television, whether with a V chip installed or not, can never fill the hole of an absent parent. 
	Thirdly, according to television, do the parents have good moral values to teach their children? The grown-ups have watched the world get rougher, and television programs along with it. When they were children conflicts were illustrated in black and white, both literally and figuratively. It was the good guys vs. the bad guys. Today television is often picturing it otherwise, and so is reality. But the parents are watching this, too, and have become used to the level of violence. If they do not see this as a problem to themselves, how can they possibly pass higher moral values onto their children? 
	In addition, violence and weapons are ways of covering up for low self-esteem. The television sure tells us so, but so does reality. This is nothing particularly for children, but goes for adults as well. If there is a lack of vocabulary in order to be in command of a situation, a gun will gain respect. In the U.S. quite recently a six-year-old girl was killed by another six-year-old because he "did not like her". He simply brought a gun to school and took her out. Can the problem been seen as shallow as that the boy killed a school-mate, and this because he might have seen that be done on television? Of course not. Questions such as: How come the little boy got his hands on a gun in the first place?, must be asked.
Finally, people have a tendency to seek themselves to what is previously known to them. Many children that act violent and are drawn to what we would call "a bad living", do so simply because they have experienced this by watching their parents or other adults. Probably far more often than because they have seen "bad living" on television. According to the little boy above, someone in his immediate surrounding must obviously have seen the gun as a way of solving problems. Are we to be surprised that he as well did? Is parental responsibility about not letting children watch violence on TV, hoping that they do not know how to work the guns that adults keep? That sounds very much like polishing that rough surface again. The ultimate parental responsibility would be to clean up the mess and make the world a better place, for adults as well as for children.
	A brief summary of the essay, as well as of the issue of children and violence on television itself, would be that parental responsibility is needed. But there is also a need to see the actual problems. If parents do not act the way that children are wanted to, the children will most likely act as their parents, instead of as they are told.
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