*A former colleague from my newspaper days at the Naperville Sun called to catch up and we got to talking about how prevalent sexual content has become in mainstream media and advertising. She said, “Sometimes I think, ‘Geez, what’s happening!’ and then other times I wonder, ‘Am I just becoming a prude?’ ”

I told her about an article in the New York Post from the day before about Burger King’s new S&M tinged Internet ad campaign (www.subservientchicken.com) that highlights video of a man dressed in a lingerie-clad chicken suit complete with garter belt. He obliges to commands like “dance,” “run” and “jump”—all under the fast-food joint’s classic slogan, “Have it your way.”

“Ask him to ‘fly,’ and he casually walks over to a red couch and throws himself, spread-eagle across its back,” says the business article, quoting a Burger King executive who says the campaign is aimed at giving today’s youth “something that was on the Internet, edgy.” The site has already logged 46.2 million hits and the chicken man made his first promotional appearance in Times Square last Saturday. Links on the site include one to Nickelodeon.

*Many babies are now immersed in electronic media for hours every day and more and more studies are showing TV viewing is a major contributor to Attention Deficit Disorder and other hyperactivity problems among children.

Dimitri Christakis, a doctor at Children’s Hospital in Seattle who led a recent study on the problem, reasoned that “unrealistically fast-paced visual images” have the potential of altering normal brain development.

Young children’s brains, which act as sponges to external stimuli, are being warped by the garbage put on TV. It’s impossible for them not to be influenced by the images and content and they have little ability to distinguish what is real from farcical.

As my pastor points out in a sermon on values, the subconscious mind is programmed by the conscious mind and whatever the conscious mind is absorbed with will be processed into the subconscious mind.

“When your subconscious mind pulls something up, it doesn’t invent it—it doesn’t have the ability to invent it; it’s just a storage system,” explains Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church in Chicago (www.graceimpact.org). “Your subconscious mind brings up these imaginations from out of the things that you put there. That’s why it’s so important that you be careful about what you let get in your mind.

“I tell young people, ‘Be careful what you let yourself love.’ I tell that to older people too. Job said, ‘I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid?’
He said, ‘I’m not going to look at suggestive, lurid, illicit things.’ He said, ‘I made an agreement with my eyes not to do that.’ That’s purposeful living. He knew there were things he didn’t want to put in his mind.”

*A segment on NPR discussed reasons why newer generations don’t produce any “literary lion” like a Hemmingway or even a John Updike. A theory expounded was that young people now grow up with their parents looking to them for guidance, rather than the other way around.

The complaint about parents not being parents is certainly not new but the scary thing is it’s coming more and more from the children themselves. The children have become the authority in the relationship.

I saw a woman interviewed on TV recently who said she let her 12-year-old son tell her who to vote for in the last big election.

A segment on the evening news reported that many new M-rated (illegal for sale to anyone under 14 years old) violent video games are being purchased by parents for their children.

A recent special on ABC about America’s obesity problem focused, in part, on how children manipulated by junk-food advertisements successfully demand the advertised food products from their parents.

"(Your children) are watching you - they see what you do," warned a Chicago-area dietitian. "We're on a very dangerous course if we do not make some changes in helping parents step up to the plate and be role models."

My pastor makes the point that “if you’re having kids just for what they’re going to add to your life, you’re doing a disservice to the kids. Children are a ministry. There’s someone for you to minister to.”

Here’s a sermon outtake from him on raising kids:

“I had somebody in our assembly say to me, ‘Well, we spank our kids—it just doesn’t work.’ I said, ‘You let me spank ’em once and I bet it’ll work. I raised three boys. I know how to spank a child and make it work.’

“There’s a certain way you do that that not only releases them from the guilt of what they’ve done and teaches them some restraint in what they’ve done, but affirms your love for them.

“Many people just slap their kids on the head or kick them in the rear end and that just makes them mad. That little dude of yours, you better not engage him in the battle of his will unless you’re willing to pay the price to win.

“A lot of you what you do with your kids provokes them. You make them mad and mean. It doesn’t take too long to find out that a little two-foot, six-inch, 40-pounder can lick a six-foot dude like you in the battle of the will, and you’ve just created a rebel.

“That’s what happens in the culture when you raise kids like that. If you’re my age, a Baby Boomer, you were raised with, ‘Nobody’s going to tell me what to do,’ and we raised our kids, ‘Nobody’s going to tell them what to do.’ And now they’re raising their kids and you’ve got three and four generations of people with, ‘Ain’t nobody gonna tell me what to do.’ And you wonder why bedlam breaks out?! It isn’t that hard to understand.

“There are some things of real importance that only take one generation to lose, but many repeated generations to rebuild in the culture.”

*In a PBS documentary about what’s happened to blacks in America, a man imprisoned for selling drugs said he grew up without a father or any positive male role model.

As he explained, most of the fathers from his impoverished Chicago neighborhood were either long-gone or in prison and the only men he and his classmates saw walking to school in the morning were drug dealers wearing gold jewelry and driving fancy cars. There were no neighborhood men leaving for work in business suits or uniforms to make any sort of impression.

In the same sense, I wonder how many American children today go through their day-to-day lives devoid of any meaningful contact with sincere, Bible-believing Christians. How do you adopt something you’ve never had a chance to observe?

A teacher from Brooklyn said in the documentary that there were many black children in the borough who had never seen or heard of the World Trade Center before 9/11.

“What they know about the world is very narrow and it’s learned on the street corners,” she assessed.