After listening to caller feedback on the scores of radio interviews I?ve done so far on my new book, Home Invasion: Protecting Your Family in a Culture That?s Gone Stark Raving Mad, I?ve got a renewed passion for my heartfelt message: Parents can fight the culture -- and win.
Caller opinion is astoundingly consistent. Today?s parents feel overwhelmed by the negative messages inundating our kids, and the vast majority of them are ready to fight back -- but, sadly, many have never learned how.
A recent poll, outlined in a piece by Linda Feldmann in The Christian Science Monitor
reveals the same conclusion I came to many months ago when I determined it was time to provide practical help to parents, grandparents, youth pastors and the like -- parents are sick and tired of being sick and tired. Headlined ?New ?mommy wars?: a fight against pop culture?s excess,? Feldmann begins her report:
?Forget about the ?mommy wars,? in which stay-at-home mothers were supposedly locking horns with their working sisters, at least in popular perception.
?What?s really happening with American mothers of all stripes -- from full-time homemakers to full-fledged workaholics, all income levels, all racial backgrounds -- is worry about popular culture, and what feels like a tsunami of forces threatening parents? ability to impart positive values to their children, according to a new survey of more than 2,000 mothers. Moms report a cultural onslaught that goes far beyond Hollywood movies and TV, and into the world of the Internet, electronic games, and advertising.?
Feldman goes on to quote Martha Farrell Erickson of the University of Minnesota, who served as the lead researcher on the study: ?We heard mothers talking about the kind of hypersexuality that?s out there, about violence and disrespect, about body image, all the things that are not exactly news, but cutting across a huge and diverse sample of mothers. What they would really like to see is mothers and fathers joining forces more effectively to take on some of these issues.?