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<title> TV-violence and parental responsibility </title>
Children and television is an issue that is brought up in an article in Time Magazine July 24, 1995, called "Locking out violence" by Ginia Bellafante. This is something I find very important since many tv-programs contain a great deal of violence. One interesting aspect of this issue is parental responsibility and that is what this essay will be focused on. I will reflect upon two aspects of parental responsibility, the first is differences between families in priority and possibilities to monitor the TV-watching. The second concerns problems and questions parents face when trying to protect their children. The situation in question is contemporary Sweden.
	 The first aspect, differences between families, is something I had not thought about at all until a few years ago when I worked at an afterschool facility for children of the ages 6-11. I then soon realized that the differences in TV-habits were tremendous. As I have understood it to be, the situation in general in Sweden is quite similar. I believe that these differences are due to differences in priority and possibilities to monitor the TV-watching. Even though these two factors have the same effect I feel that the first is more alarming since it is necessary to acknowledge a problem and make it a priority in order to make a change. I think many parents do not make it a priority simply because they do not realize that their children actually watch violent TV-programs. Therefore debating TV-violence is very important to create awareness. Unfortunately it is not enough to make the issue a priority, it is also necessary to monitor the TV-watching. This can be difficult if the parents work a lot which is the case for many parents, and how can a parent monitor what the child watches at a friend's house? This aspect of parental responsibility seems to have been forgotten by those who claim that it is entirely up to the parents to keep the children from watching violence on TV.
	 The second aspect has been given more attention than the previous one. This aspect concerns problems and questions parents face when trying to protect their children from seeing violence on TV. One problem is how a parent can know what TV-program or film will contain violence. Even though films usually are presented with a brief description there is no guarantee that a film that seems completely harmless will not contain some violence. It is even more difficult to know what TV-programs are violent. Many of the programs that are shown as children's programs are very violent so the fact that a program is called a children's program does not guarantee that there will be no violence. Then, of course, there are the news that can be very violent and I think many people agree that small children should not watch the news at all. This brings up the question of when a child is old enough to watch the news, this question is far from easy to answer. The same goes for other questions parents need to think about, such as: At what age can my child be allowed to watch programs or films that contain some violence? Should I ever allow my child to watch violence on TV? Is it possible to never allow my child to watch violent programs? If I decide that my child can watch more violent films and programs from a certain age should I talk about the violence with my child or can I assume that my child understand the difference between reality and fiction? The complexity of these questions hardly needs to be explained.
	 In this essay I have reflected upon two aspects of parental responsibility concerning children and TV-violence which I feel make the issue of parental responsibility more complex than our society tend to acknowledge. In my opinion parental responsibility is not something that we can take for granted and therefore I feel that it is necessary to take different approaches to the problem with violence on TV.
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