Parents Liken TV to Night Patrol in Hostile Territory

Nobody ever said raising kids was easy. But when Michelle Convissar ponders how hard it is to be a parent these days, there’s one challenge she never expected.

“You worry about schools, violence, sex, drugs, tobacco and alcohol, but I never thought television would become such a full-time responsibility,” says the New Jersey mother of three. “It’s supposed to be benign entertainment, yet now it’s this overwhelming weight on you, another thing to worry about.”

Who can keep a hostile world at bay, she wonders, when so many social problems--crime, drug abuse and sexual misconduct--come pouring out of a TV into your living room? Is it even possible now to watch network shows with kids in prime-time hours?

“As a parent, it’s gotten harder to make choices about the shows your children can see,” Convissar says. “It’s a problem all over America, and I hear a lot of people talking about it these days. But you wonder if anything will really change.”

Her skepticism is understandable. Currently, television executives, politicians, educators, grass-roots advocates and others are caught up in a fierce debate over television’s impact on children and the ways programs could be rated--like movies--to help parents make viewing decisions. But whether families will benefit in the long run is another question.

Indeed, the TV industry implemented a system five months ago that rates programs according to the age groups for which they are suitable. Proponents argued that these guidelines, coupled with a V-chip allowing parents to lock out unwanted shows, would help most families make better viewing choices.

Yet critics blasted the code as inadequate, demanding instead that programmers rate shows according to content, alerting parents to the presence of sex, violence and coarse language. Faced with the threat of restrictive legislation, industry officials backed down last week and tentatively agreed to make some enhancements. The volatile issue will be debated at a June 20 meeting of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington.

Meanwhile, players on all sides continue to stoke the controversy, invoking the needs--and fears--of American families to support competing positions. But what do parents themselves think?

To find out, The Times recently visited four families in different regions during prime-time hours. Their friendly living rooms offer a glimpse of the battle over what to watch that goes on nightly in millions of homes. They also illuminate the frequently tough choices parents make between censoring what children see and allowing them to enjoy TV programming.

The profiles that follow are hardly a statistical sample, and it would be misleading to draw anything but anecdotal conclusions from them. Yet one common view emerges: These parents in suburban New Jersey, rural Texas, small-town Pennsylvania and West Hollywood agree that network TV is a jungle for many families, and they want more tools to make viewing decisions.

None is hopeful that program quality will improve any time soon, but this doesn’t stop them from watching. As the lights dim across America, prime-time TV is a tough habit to kick.

State College, Pa. / ‘You Are Totally On Your Own’

In the home of Joe and Liz Pierce, a nightly ritual has begun. The parents and their two sons gather around the television, and while they wait for “The X-Files” to begin, the talk turns to TV and its negative impact on children.

“Ninety-nine percent of what’s on TV these days is trash, in my opinion,” says Liz. “It’s totally wrong for kids.”

As she speaks, Adam, 10, and Mac, 7, are flopped on the floor, munching popcorn and watching terrorists blow each other’s brains out in a Harrison Ford movie. At one point, a woman slinks out of bed and shoots her lover in the head.

“It’s violence, but it’s violence as part of a larger story of good versus evil,” explains Joe, the banquet chef at an inn run by Pennsylvania State University, which dominates the small town of State College. “I can talk to the kids about this, but other programs are much too violent for them.”

Violence isn’t much of a problem in this clean, tranquil community surrounded by farms and rolling hills. Here, the most frequent threats to order are drunk freshmen falling out of dormitory windows. But the campus was also rocked last year by a gunman who killed one person and injured others in a random spree.

“We’re not like a big city; it’s still a small town, but we all know the world is changing,” says Liz. “And the problem with television is it can be so graphic. Do we really need programs to show us slashings just like on the local news?”

In the Pierce home, at least one of four TV sets is on several hours each day. But they face competition: When a guest arrives on Sunday night, the living room TV blares a movie, the boys are playing a computer game, and a stereo plays rock music in another room. When the family finally assembles in front of the TV, Joe settles in his favorite chair, pours a beer and jokes that he’d watch the tube all the time if he could.

He also confesses that when it comes to television, his older son may be “a true addict. . . . I’ve got to be believe there’s a cable running between that TV and his brain.”

The cable, however, is on a tight leash. Liz Pierce, who runs a home day-care center, has strong ideas of what is appropriate TV, and she’s had to regulate what her kids watch.

Increasingly, the mother says, she uses the clicker to change programs when violence or sex crops up on a show. It’s getting harder, though, with 50-odd channels to monitor.

“Without an honest ratings system,” she adds, “you are totally on your own.” But Liz believes the system that went into effect Jan. 1 is “completely useless” because categories based on age groups are highly subjective. What works for one 12-year-old, she says, might not be appropriate for another.

More important, the ratings are not printed in her local newspaper, and they appear so fast on the screen, it’s hard to make viewing decisions. Asked what they’d like instead, the Pierces call for content-based ratings focusing on sex, violence and language. They fully intend to use the V-chip when it becomes available in new TV sets (supposedly next year), but recognize there’s no substitute for strong parenting.

“I don’t want the government or networks telling me what to watch,” says Joe, turning up the volume and settling back in his chair. “It’s my responsibility to choose for my family.”

Orchard, Texas / ‘Parents Have to Be Vigilant’

On Dan and Merrie Pope’s small Texas farm, responsibility is a sacred word. But they see little of it on American TV.

“What I see is a distortion,” notes Merrie, a landscape architect. “There’s crime, inappropriate sex and language that doesn’t reflect the world I know, and I’ve traveled in large cities and small. On TV, I don’t see real people.”

Instead, she says, there are programs like “The Simpsons,” which show children talking disrespectfully to parents. As a result, the Popes have put limits on the shows their two children can watch. Real limits, as in: no TV during the week.

Without pinpoint directions, you’d miss their 80-acre farm off a small highway in southeastern Texas, about 40 miles from Houston. Trucks and cars blast down the two-lane road, leaving goats, cattle, chickens and horses behind in a rear-view blur.

“We like this kind of privacy,” says Dan, an irrigation consultant. “But with TV these days, the world can come rushing into your home no matter where you live.”

On a quiet Wednesday night, the family gathers for a dinner of barbecued beef and pork ribs. They say a brief prayer and the two children, Dannielle, 12, and Dalton, 10, talk about their latest 4-H exploits. Afterward, Dan and Merrie are happy to discuss TV, but with the living room set turned off.

“During weekends we’re busy,” says Merrie, “although we think ‘Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman’ is a great show. We used to watch ‘Touched by an Angel’ when it was on Saturday, but we don’t watch it now because it moved to Sunday and that’s a night before school. We really try to watch as a family.”

On this farm, family also means Sid and Grace Talley, Merrie’s parents, who live in a separate house 100 yards away. The kids visit their grandparents every day, and sometimes they sneak a peek at the very shows their parents forbid them to watch--like “Melrose Place” and “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

Dan and Merrie discipline their children when this happens, and the kids smile sheepishly at such stories. Yet it’s no laughing matter to the parents, who ask their children to leave the room when the subject of inappropriate TV fare comes up.

Given their concerns, the Popes are not impressed with the current ratings code. Even if the local newspaper published the guidelines--and it doesn’t--the parents are put off by the idea of TV executives recommending which age groups should or shouldn’t watch particular shows.

Eventually, Dannielle and Dalton will make TV choices for themselves--on an honor system, Dan notes--but he says a content-based ratings system is needed, so adults can know just what to expect in the way of sex, language and violence.

“The ratings they [the industry] proposed were a joke,” adds Merrie. “But even if every show was like ‘Leave it to Beaver,’ parents would still have to be vigilant. The world has changed since we grew up. . . . I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”

Cherry Hill, N.J. / ‘Is TV Just a Baby-Sitter?’

Nostalgia for the Beaver may be a stretch, but Jerry and Michelle Convissar would happily settle for 1987. As recently as 10 years ago, they say, there were programs like “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties” that parents and kids could watch together.

Back then, when TV wasn’t such a concern, the New Jersey family found time to gather in front of the tube. Yet now, with two younger sons, David, 7, and Jacob, 5, television seems to be as much a minefield as a cheap form of entertainment.

“When we were new parents, I regulated TV almost painfully,” says Michelle, a dental hygienist who works with her husband, a dentist. “But now I don’t have the time to censor so diligently, and most TV has gotten worse.”

Tonight the Convassirs are relaxing in their den. Brad, now 19 and home from college, fiddles idly with a computer next to the TV set. His younger brothers are demanding to watch a children’s cartoon show, and Michelle and Jerry give grudging permission. Then the kids get distracted and TV is forgotten.

It isn’t always that easy: When Brad was a boy, Michelle had a big fight with him over her decision to ban “Tom and Jerry” cartoons in the house. They were simply too violent, she said. Soon, however, David and Jacob will be clamoring to watch shows that are far more objectionable. What’s a parent to do?

Jerry cringes at the idea of government or TV networks stifling programming with overly-restrictive ratings. But he’d appreciate a content-based system to help him sort through prime-time programming, most of which he doesn’t know well.

The problem with the current TV ratings system, he says, is that it smacks of Big Brother telling parents what to watch. Two 14-year-olds are never going to be identical, so a generalized age rating is not much of an aid, he adds. Parents need specific information to make decisions on their own.

“If they’d tell me that a show was going to be sexual in nature, I would be more inclined not to have them [his sons] watch,” he says. “But if they throw in a naughty word here and there and the rating tells me that, too, I might be more inclined to let them watch it. That would help me.”

Meanwhile, television is just one more diversion in the Convissar house. Besides the computer, there’s a pool table downstairs, books, games and videos for the boys and a big yard out back. With summer nearing, nobody here is going to be wasting too many evening hours in front of the tube.

“I know parents who don’t worry about it [TV] as much as I do,” says Michelle. “But this doesn’t make me better or worse than them. It comes down to this question: How much time do you spend with your kids, and how much is TV just a baby-sitter?”

West Hollywood / ‘We Do Other Things’

For Richard and Teresa Iizuka, the answer is simple: No cable television, no Nick at Nite, no problem.

“We hadn’t even thought about television and what it meant for children until our daughter was 2,” says Teresa, curled up on a sofa in her West Hollywood condominium. “But then we got concerned about what was going to be fed to our child.”

So much so, in fact, that the Iizuka’s decided to strictly monitor what Nicole could watch. They encouraged her to do almost anything except sit in front of a TV, and now, at an age when many teenage girls are hooked on a multitude of shows aimed directly at them, Nicole seems blithely unconcerned.

“I’m not really into being cool,” says the 12-year-old, who attends the private Harvard-Westlake school in Studio City. “There’s a whole group of kids who watch a lot of TV. They talk about what movies are in, who’s going out with whom and what clothes are in.”

On a recent night, Nicole visited a girlfriend who wanted to watch a movie on TV. But she prevailed on her to go hiking in the Hollywood Hills instead, and says they had a much better time. Tonight, she’s sprawled on a chair, listening curiously while adults talk about television. The family set is turned off.

Life was much different for her parents. Both Richard, a Los Angeles County entymologist, and Theresa, who runs her own drapery and bedding manufacturing company, remember spending many hours in front of the TV set with their families. Both grew up in Southern California, and Theresa recalls her grandmother being mesmerized by roller derby and wrestling shows from the Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles.

“Obviously the world is a different place now, and the violence you see on TV is very real, very frightening,” says Richard. “We’d like to think that we did the right thing.”

Sometimes he’s not so sure. As baby boomers, the Iizukas say they grew up asking questions, challenging accepted explanations. Now they’re playing the role of censors, trying to protect their child from often vulgar media images.

It has made for ironic choices: Despite their strong stand, Richard and Theresa worry if they’ve deprived Nicole of some basic social experiences that teenagers get from television. On the other hand, they took her to see “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” deciding she was mature enough to appreciate the R-rated film.

The key, says Richard, is information. Parents need a strong, content-based ratings system to help decide what kind of TV shows their kids should watch. Neither he nor his wife have paid much attention to the industry’s ratings symbols, believing they skirt the issue of how much sex, violence or objectionable language is contained in a specific program.

Without clear guidelines, asks Theresa, why even create the system? Parents should be the ones to decide if a child can handle certain programming--not an industry committee.

In the meantime, Nicole lives a relatively TV-free life in the nation’s entertainment capital, and her parents have also managed to spend their evenings without relying on the tube. “Now don’t get me wrong, we watch some TV once in a while,” says Theresa, “but we don’t have fixed times to watch certain shows, like ‘ER.’ I mean, we do other things.”

She laughs and adds, with a trace of sarcasm: “That’s sad, isn’t it?”