Lately Jeremy has been really into football – playing, watching, asking questions and forming opinions about teams. He soaks up halftime reports and bugs me all the time about who’s playing whom, when does the game start, and “Mom, can you check the schedule again?”
However, as of the last few weeks, I’ve been denying him access to anything on TV except actual games. All thanks to the Penn State scandal.
I’ve always been careful about what the boys see and hear. All it takes is a couple of words to plant the seeds of curiosity, and there is entirely too much garbage on television right now to leave two little boys alone with the remote.
Case in point: We watched an episode of How the States Got Their Shapes on the History Channel a few weeks ago, and Utah was the state of discussion. The host was doing a fabulous job of dancing around the subject of polygamy in the early century and avoiding buzz words that might border on provocative. I was pleased about that – until at the very end, during the credits, the host finally said the magic word: sex.
Without missing a beat, Jeremy pipes up, “What’s sex?”
Even though we answered the question appropriately, I died a little that day. Here we go.
At eight years old, he’s on the cusp of a lot of curiosity, so the last things I want him hearing on SportsCenter are words like sexual abuse and sodomy, especially since he won’t waste anytime running to ask me what they mean. Those words will pop up eventually, but at his age, I’m going to do my best to prevent them from happening anytime soon.
Anyone who’s raising (or has raised) boys will catch my drift. Their little brains are impressionable, particularly with certain subjects. What we teach them now will be the foundation upon what we teach them later. Everything counts.
While typing this blog post Jeremy has come to me three times to ask three different questions about football:
“I can’t believe the Vikings lost so badly on Monday! Who is Green Bay playing this weekend?”
“I hope I get a scholarship to college and can go play for the Colts after I graduate. Would you be happy if I played for the Colts?”
“Do you think Tennessee will beat Vanderbilt on Saturday? I don’t know, Mom. It’s not looking good. Who is Auburn playing?”
Those questions, I think I can handle.
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