market reveals dysfunctional childhood

mary eberstadt writes in policy review (via arts & letters daily):

If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music — the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before — is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers.

eberstadt points out that analyzing the effect of today's music without understanding why kids love it is wrong-headed. she argues that current artists are simply answering "to what ails the modern teenager." her point has been made before and is worth repeating: we should examine both cause and effect of popular music. via the free market kids selected this particular type of music to identify with and be wildly popular, which could be evidence of a collective dysfunctional childhood experience.

Where parents and entertainers disagree is over who exactly bears responsibility for this moral chaos. ... [T]he music idols who point the finger away from themselves and toward the emptied-out homes of America are telling a truth that some adults would rather not hear. In this limited sense at least, Eminem is right.

the cause/effect is not clear. it's been well documented that media can influence a child's behavior, but only to a limited extent and only if there is little parental involvement. from a 1999 study:

The data also revealed that parental mediation works by first influencing either how important children perceive violent TV to be or how much attention they grant this content, which, in turn, influence aggressive tendencies. Hence, parental mediation seems to socialize children into an orientation toward TV that makes them less vulnerable to negative effects.

so it seems bad parenting causes not only affinity for, but also vulnerability to, the negative influence of media violence.

Labels: economics