Over the years, Plugged In has spent a lot of time cataloging studies about how media and popular culture influence youth. I think it’s safe to say there have been far fewer studies—in fact, I can’t think of any—focused on how the same culture might be influencing parents.
Until now.
Researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania recently conducted a study that tried to gauge how violent and sexual content in movies affected parents. Specifically, they sought to measure how being repeatedly exposed to such images influenced what parents thought would be appropriate for children. In a nutshell, they found that, as parents see more sex and violence in movies, they become more desensitized to it themselves and are more likely to let their children watch such movies at younger ages.
The study involved 1,000 parents of children between the ages of 6 and 17. Parents were shown clips from three mainstream films containing graphic violence, then three clips from explicit sex scenes. Films involved were rated both PG-13 and R, and included such movies as Collateral, Die Hard, 8 Mile and others.
After each clip, researchers asked participants what age they thought the film would be appropriate for, giving them a range from 6 to 19 years old. For the first violent clip, the average age parents chose was 16.9 years old, and for the first sexually oriented clip, it was 17.2.
After watching several snippets of graphic content, however, parents said that 13.9 was old enough for the violent material and 14 for the sexual content. In addition, parents who’d watched films with graphic sexual and violent content in the week before the study were more likely to OK such material for younger viewers.
Daniel Romer, associate director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, summarized the study’s findings by saying simply, “We saw a really remarkable desensitization.” In a separate interview, he added, “We were most surprised by how clear and dramatic the decline was to showing that kind of content to young people and the willingness to let their own children to see it.”
Romer also noted that there seem to be increasing levels of violence in film these days, especially in PG-13 movies, and that there hasn’t been much outcry or concern about it. “The rise of violence and gun violence in PG-13 movies means that lots of kids are able to go into movie theaters and see explicit violence. We wanted to find out why parents didn’t show more concern. Why was this happening without pushback?” The answer, his team’s research suggests, is that parents are desensitized to such content themselves.
Because the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating team is comprised of parents, Romer’s team hypothesized further that this desensitization could be a contributing factor with regard to so-called “ratings creep,” the phenomenon of movies’ problematic content being rated more leniently over time.
We often focus as parents on our children’s media habits. But this study strongly suggests that we need to be equally vigilant with regard to our own choices, as repeated exposure to graphic imagery may be quietly desensitizing our own convictions about what our children should see. Dr. Jeanne Van Cleave, an assistant in pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children, emphasized that point in her comments about this study: “I’m not sure parents realize their own movie-viewing habits might influence their decisions about what their kids can watch. But I think that’s something they should be aware of.”
Definitely something to be aware of—and to reckon with soberly—in our media choices as parents, as the choices we make may have a greater influence on our children than we completely realize.
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