Great, yet alarming, interview, with Peter Breggin by the great Del Bigtree:
One comment related to Dr. Breggin’s discussion: Americans have settled into a habit of always looking to government to fix problems, or protect us or our children, and we are reaping the fruits of that devil’s bargain. Because, if we ask the government for protection, it will happily oblige, and proceed to bring in industry after industry to do the “protecting”. This mass abdication of parental responsibility, this naive faith that government could possibly protect us from everything, has, perversely, led to a situation where our children are far less safe than they would have been if we as parents began acting like parents. Government can’t protect our kids from dangerous consumer products, or disgusting music or movies, or from the worst aspects of the internet. Only we can do that. It doesn’t even take that much effort, but it’s effort that must be made. Instead of dumping our children in the middle of unfiltered pop culture without giving them any frame of reference, we could guide them and protect them from it. The notion of protecting our kids is now frowned upon and labeled “helicopter parenting”, but how many of today’s generation understand that they didn’t get nearly enough guidance while growing up during the rise of the internet and the proliferation of so much pop culture garbage? If our children are harmed, whether psychologically or physically as a result of exposure to this environment of unfiltered, gutter pop culture or bad food or whatever, it’s not the government’s fault for failing to protect them. It is ours.
