Creating A Sense Of Belonging In A Media-Saturated Culture
A woman with a five year old asked me if it was normal that her son was expressing a desire to run away from home, telling her "I hate you" and screaming that she didn't understand him when he felt angry. She said that she wasn't expecting that type of behavior until he was a teenager.
More and more often now I'm being asked the question "is it normal for a young child to be so rude, to want to run away, to have such an `attitude'?" Unfortunately the answer is not altogether clear cut. On the one hand, children of all ages speak in a kind of code. Especially when they're angry they have a tendency to miscommunicate that feeling by screaming things like "I hate you." So in that sense, occasional rude behavior, or screaming "I hate you" is normal. On the other hand, I as well as other counselors are seeing an alarming trend - younger and younger children are expressing a desire to get away from the dependency that they should have and do need from their parents. In addition, younger children are adopting mannerisms, verbal communication and "attitude" that was once the realm of teens only. It's this too early "pushing away" and rejection of their parents as well as the untimely adoption of adolescent behaviors that is of concern. And it comes from the fact that many children feel less and less like they "belong" in their family, and more and more like they "belong" in the hyped, media saturated culture that whirls around them daily.
Parent educators and psychologists who study child development believe one critical problem that exists for children today is that they are suffering from overexposure to developmentally inappropriate ideas and images. Mary Pipher, in her book "The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding our Families" states that "we live in houses without walls ... More and more often our children are being exposed to information that they are not developmentally capable of handling, and to people whose sole intent may be to harm them." She's referring to children's exposure to television, the internet, movies and video games.
Yet most parents are unaware of how harmful it can be to expose their children to too much, too fast. Even seemingly harmless movies, videos and television shows which are marketed towards younger children can present images which children have difficulty processing. For example, a woman with a three year old girl was disturbed because her daughter was tying her Barbie dolls up, hanging them upside down and screaming "fire, she's on fire, come save her." While this disturbing behavior would initially make a therapist think the child had suffered some horrible trauma, after a bit of conversation it became apparent that the child's favorite video at the time was Disney's "Hunchback of Notre Dame" and the child was simply trying to process, through her play, the disturbing image of Esmerelda being burned at the stake. When the mother took the video away (as well as other videos with disturbing scenes) the child discontinued playing
