Why Media Literacy is So Important For Our Kids

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I am writing this as a parent who is incredibly grateful that the school my girls attend teaches media literacy aggressively and early. Beginning in the 5th grade, the teachers present the students with examples of how we are barraged every day with messages that may or may not represent us, but whose sole aim is to sell us something, even if couched in the guise of “entertainment.”

And so I was not terribly surprised to see the article in this morning’s New York Times regarding the MTV reality series “16 and Pregnant.” (Disclaimer: I have never watched, nor do I anticipate ever watching this show. I cannot speak to the relative merits or pitfalls of it, and I’m more interested in the larger theme of media influence, in any case.) The Nielsen company, responsible for television ratings among other things, released a report suggesting that this show and others like it may have “prevented 20,000 births to teenage mothers in 2010.” Don’t ask me how they did the study. I didn’t delve too deeply in to it, but I suspect some other folks will, given the voices that have been raised in opposition to shows like this since their beginning. The people in that camp believe that these shows glamorize teen motherhood by featuring the teens on television, thus rendering them celebrities, and may convince young girls to go out and get pregnant before they are ready to.  Again, I don’t have a dog in this fight, at least not with regards to this particular blog post.  What strikes me is that what both sides have in common is the assertion that television shows, among other media sources, have a strong impact on their audience, so much so that they can influence major life decisions.  With that, I will agree.

Last week on the way home from school, Eve reported that the 8th graders had begun a new unit in their health class involving body image.

“We’ve had two classes on it so far and, man, there’s no way we’re ever gonna get through even fifteen minutes without someone bursting into tears. I mean, even though we know that pictures are Photoshopped and nobody looks like a Barbie doll, some of the girls in my class have such low self-esteem because they think their bodies are all wrong that they can’t stop sobbing.”

I confess to being surprised.  This is a school that has encouraged families to watch the critically acclaimed Miss Representation with their children, a school that has the 7th grade students create their own posters using images from magazines to demonstrate their understanding of media messages and how harmful they can be, a school that embraces and holds up diversity as a source of power. And yet, there are girls who are still so divided in their loyalties to themselves versus someone else’s idea of what they ought to look like that they can’t make it through a class on body image without feeling awful.

Let us not underestimate the power of both the media and the perpetuation of those messages among our youth. Let us continue to talk to our children about what is truly important and worthy. Let us help them to think critically about what they see and hear and decipher which messages are there to lift them up and which ones are there to tear them down and open their wallets.  As Stephen Colbert once said:

“But if girls feel good about themselves, how can we sell them things they don’t need?”

Texas Outdoes Itself

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I wonder if the government of the state of Texas is prepared to pay a whole hell of a lot of money in a civil suit. I suspect so, given their seemingly intractable belief that women do not own their own bodies when it comes to reproduction, but then I can’t even begin to understand what they’re thinking now. We might as well be talking to aliens from Mars.

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about Marlise Munoz, the woman who is on life support against her own wishes and the wishes of her family, but just in case you haven’t, I’ll fill you in.  In late November of 2013, Marlise collapsed at home and her husband, a paramedic, rushed her to the hospital to discover that her brain had been deprived of oxygen too long. She was officially brain dead.  Marlise, a paramedic herself, had previously expressed her wishes to her family to be taken off of life support should she ever find herself in this position and had even, some reports say, gone so far as to complete a living will to that effect.

Unfortunately for her and her family, Marlise happened to be 14 weeks pregnant at the time of her collapse and happened to live in a part of the world where the government gets to rule your body after you get pregnant.  She remains on life support until such time as the baby can safely be delivered. She remains on life support against her wishes and the wishes of her family. 


There is so much wrong with this case that I am almost uncertain where to begin. Almost. 


First of all, her family is presumably being held responsible for the incredibly expensive cost of keeping her alive. Even though the state is forcing the issue, I suspect they aren’t offering to foot the bill for the machines that are doing her breathing for her and nourishing her brain-dead body to keep the fetus alive and healthy.


Second, there is no guarantee, or even much evidence, that suggests that this baby will be born at term or healthy. Has there been any consideration of what happens if the baby is born with significant deficits in development due to his or her mother’s condition throughout the pregnancy? And if the father, who is currently raising another child now on the salary of one paramedic by himself, is forced to be a single parent to a child with special needs who requires additional care beyond what he is able to provide, is the state of Texas going to pay for that? Not only has this man lost his life partner and the mother of his other child, he is being forced into debt and relieved of making some of the most important life decisions on his own by the state of Texas – decisions that will affect him and his children for the rest of their lives.  


This situation is certainly a tragic one and the child with whom Marlise is pregnant was, by all accounts, wanted. Had her husband tried to go against the wishes expressed in her living will in order to save the fetus, there would certainly be a different ethical question at hand given that the child is his as well. But in this case, he is actively trying to comply with his wife’s wishes and the government has intervened in an area they have no business messing around with. If they continue to push the issue, I see no reason why they ought not to be held financially responsible for any hardship they have created by doing so.