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iQuestions Faculty, Ted Baehr 
 
 
Question: 
 
As a parent, is there a way I can control what influence music, TV and 
movies have on my kids? 
 
Answer: 
 
The best way you can control the influence of television, movies, and 
music is to help your children develop those mechanisms, those tools, 
so that they can be responsible. 
 
Children don’t want to be manipulated. They want to be responsible. 
Help them to do that. 
 
Number one is to help them to understand how the media works, how 
the media influences, and especially—and I’ll focus this right now—to 
understand their values and their beliefs. The values and beliefs that 
they agree on, that you’ve imparted to them. 
 
Let them make their own television, music, movie rating standards.  
 
For instance, in their rating standards put at the top—how about 
“animals”? How do we want to treat animals? Do we want to beat 
animals? Do we want to hurt animals? Do we want to kick animals?  
 
Just put down a few standards, and if they say “never,” “not at all,” 
“maybe in a dramatic situation,” then those become their standards. 
 
How do we want to deal with boys or girls? How do we want to deal 
with language and abusive language?  
 
 
 
When they’ve developed their standards—it doesn’t have to be too 
long, maybe twenty or thirty points—then you say, “OK, now you want 
to watch this program (whatever it happens to be) and it contains a lot 
of violence in it.”  
 
One young person said to me that their daughter was dying to see a 
movie. And when they read in our movieguide.org reviews that the 
woman’s head was cut off, they said, “This is not what I want to see.” 
 
So they’re immediately applying their standards. They have decided 
they don’t want to see gruesome violence. They don’t want to hear 
foul language. They’ve written their standards, and they’re no longer 
relying on the standards of the Motion Picture Association.  
 
Help your children to be self-regulating. When they see 63,000 hours 
of music, movies, television, iPods, and all of that by the time they’re 
seventeen, they have to be self-regulating. And you can teach them to 
do just that. 
Baehr -2- 
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