"Children today have an unprecedented number of options when it comes to entertainment.

ESSAY QUESTION:
"Children today have an unprecedented number of options when it comes to entertainment. Since no parent can be aware of all of these options, it falls to the entertainment media to ensure that their content is suitable for young consumers."
Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your point of view with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.

MY RESPONSE:

Nobody likes high responsibility. And in situations when the lack of control can lead to serious consequences nobody wants to be responsible for the execution of control. One of the most important issues ever has been a problem of children's education and upbringing. It is really difficult to decide in general what children should be allowed to know and which information can be harmful for their development. The aggreviation of this problem is the fact that all children are different and their perception of the information can lead to different results.

Nevertheless, I think that the common standards of children's education and ledger should be developed. We know that school programs are already more or less unified. But most part of their time children spend at home. According to the recent statistics of the Times magazine the main sources of information for children are television, music and internet. And if parents know that most of their time young people spend watching entertainment channels, listening to radio and surfing into internet of course they are concerned about the content of information in those sources.

Everybody heard about cases when children downloaded porn from internet, watched racist programs and chatted with perverts in dating sites. How to avoid it? On the one hand, parents should control their children, because at the result they and only they are responsible for the future of their children and only they will struggle with the problems which potentially can occur. On the other hand, parents cannot control everything, they have also other responsibilities. At least, they have to go to work and provide money for their families.

So, I think that the best solution for this problem will be mutual control over content of entertainment media. Of course, people should understand that entertainment is not devoted to children only. There is a demand on programs designed for grown-up and media companies do not want to loose their profits. One of the solutions of this problem is to translate the grown-up programs on TV in the evening. By this time parents have to be at home and be able to check what show their children are watching. Also at day time media companies should be very careful about the content of the advertisement, because children are very sensitive to it. If children see the advertisement of alcohol or cigarettes they can get an impulse to try that. I have to admit, that in the most of countries this type of advertisement is not allowed. For example, in Russia it is prohibited to advertise beer at day time and the advertisement of strong alcohol drinks is not allowed at all.

I think that the responsibility for the content of entertainment media should be beard by parents and media companies simultaneously. But I know that there is an expression that in the situation where there are too many people are responsible for something it can happen that nobody will try to perform his duties properly. I would offer to separate responsibilities in the following way: at the day time entertainment media should be responsible for making the content suitable for young customers. But in the evening when the parents are at home, they have to be responsible for the information available for their own children. In this case entertainment media still will be able to make profits and children's education won't be hurt by improper information.