Hannah Montana

Of the many challenging aspects of parenting, one of the greatest is the pressure to restrict or ban your kids from watching or listening to entertainers who push the boundaries of decency. The seamier parts of popular culture are so pervasive that it often seems impossible to shield your children from what the classification people like to call “adult concepts”.

Consider the program Masterchef. It’s terrific family entertainment - fun, civilised, educational. Masterchef has Katy Perry’s “Hot and Cold” as its theme song. After watching it a few times the kids love this catchy tune and ask you to download it from iTunes. Next thing you know you’re playing it in the car and your five-year-old son is singing along with the offensively incomprehensible line “And you PMS like a bitch that I know.” Terrific stuff.

Should you step in and play the censor, you risk drawing their attention to something they either don’t understand, or hadn’t even noticed anyway. And if you go fully down the path of banning them from a certain performer, you also risk turning that person into such a mysteriously illicit figure that your kids are much more interested in them than they were in the first place.

Continue reading "Miley Madness and society’s irreversible moral decline" »

Hannah Montana. The very name is enough to chill the heart of any parent desperate to dodge the scourge of our age – the commercial exploitation of young children.

Weak fool that I am, though, I gave in recently to my 10-year-old daughter’s pleas to watch the show.

“You get the best of both worlds,” crooned Miss Miley Cyrus as we tuned in to the Disney Channel. If only, I growled to myself.

Continue reading "Why I hate Hannah Montana" »