My husband’s folks did not allow any private media of any sort in his home. There were no radios or technology of any sort in their rooms. The music that they listened to was what the entire family listened to. The children were not allowed to listen to any of their own choosing. The same was true for my family. Even though the TV was all the rage as a new invention, we weren't allowed to have any of it, for years and years. When it was allowed in later, it was heavily monitored—no shoot-em-up shows, etc :) We raised ours the same way: absolutely no private access to any media in the bedroom. Todd and I both grew up super production-oriented, and it was the making of both of us. It made us leaders. We are able to coast somewhat now in older age because of what our childhoods looked like. Those beginnings are super significant for how the rest of life plays out.
You could say the same for many Jewish children today. That is why so many of them win Nobel prizes and take the highest music awards in the world, and why they have the highest number of entrepreneurs per capita and export a large portion of the produce consumed in Europe. They work like maniacs (six days a week, apart from the Biblical holidays). If you look at what an American child is doing at 3:30 in the afternoon it generally has something to do with media. If you look at what a Jewish child is doing, he is memorizing the Torah, learning agriculture, practicing for an eventual audition for the Jerusalem symphony, apprenticing with his father, publishing (the Jews publish an astronomical about of books, one of the highest publishing rates in the world) and their Technion (The Israel Institute of Technology) designs some of the major groundbreaking medical and agricultural inventions of the world.
If you look at the example of the Hebrews’ time under Pharaoh, living in Goshen, you see that they willfully separated from the Egyptian culture. They wouldn't have thought of interfacing with Egyptians’ families or allowing their children to play with the others. Long before that, the Patriarch Abraham took it so seriously, he wouldn't even let his son Isaac as a grown man take a trip by himself. :) Mordechai stayed outside the King’s walls and stalked them every evening to keep tabs on his grown relative, his cousin Esther.
The point of this is, our parenting job might be easier if we lay the axe at the root of our entire culture first. This means our children will not be reading the world’s magazines, its books, or its blogs, or listening to its music. They’ll need to just get used to it. We are a separate people. If you have the one big battle of saying “NO” to the prattle of our culture, you might avoid 100 little battles. Turn off all the media and trade it for work, developing skills, producing things. Then vigorously applaud each of your children for each accomplishment. Draw their self-worth not from peers but from their own accomplishments and from their relationship to both their earthly father and our heavenly Father.
You are right to be concerned over every little inroad of the world, no matter how mild. Maintain (or retrieve) control at the "letting out of waters."
