Think of the children

By Nick Elmer
Collegian Editor
February 21, 2007

A child is essentially a blank slate. Through my years of working in a preschool, I have come to realize this. Any input they receive from the outside world, any at all, can have lasting affects on their behaviors.

As kids, they have little to relate new information to. There is nothing to play it off of. So the new information becomes a form of data extremely close to fact. Show a little girl a Disney movie and she will want to be a princess when she grows up. This is an example of how something will imprint upon a little child.

Granted, the kids of the Evesham elementary school class were older, but they still were naive to many things we take for granted in the outside world. The video in question, then, would create lasting affects on the children. The list of possible affects from viewing the video does not include acquired homosexuality.

This is not The Ring, and you cannot become gay by watching a video tape. Yet the idea of a same-sex couple could have permanent effects on children’s gender identification, social aptitude and maybe even their sexual drives later on in life if the image is that strong to them.

This can be a problem since it is the elementary school years when a kid can actually start to learn how to appropriately deal with social situations. It is during these years they learn the foundations to social diplomatic behavior and how to handle conflicts that do not involve who got to the toy blocks first.

The smallest in disturbances within the child can leave him or her behind in development. This is not an issue of whether homosexuality is wrong (which it is not). Nor is it an issue on whether sex education should be taught in public schools (which it should). This is an issue about what is best for these kids and whether the video in question falls under that category.

The video also exposes the children to some ideas that the parents of the kids might not have wanted their children exposed to yet. Even if what they are shown is “reality,” it is also the school’s version of reality. It is the parents’ responsibility to ease their kids out of the cocoon of youth and into the fullness of reality as slowly or quickly as they want, not that of the school, especially when the school had not informed the parents of the contents of this video.

One can argue that the video was meant to expose kids to the large variety of families that can exist in the world. Through this exposure, hopefully the kids would develop a greater tolerance towards families that are different from their own and their classmates who are members of them. There must be another reason to show the video, if not for the benefit of the kids.

So, showing the video to the students of the school seemed to be an act with a single intent in mind: starting a ruckus. The video was a bad idea. Compare the good to the bad when showing it to the children and the results are pretty clear cut. The bad: some kids might get screwed up during some of the most socially important years of their lives, the parents’ trust is violated, and the wellbeing of the kids is lost in the shuffle of debate. The good: a few kids might not do a double take the next time they see a same sex couple in public.

Things certainly do not look so great for the video when the effects are stacked like this.

elmern1@lasalle.edu