Depicting Mom in Entertainment, Part 2
Written by Brent Leavitt Tuesday, 02 September 2008 16:27
I am going to be plain spoken this morning, but I pray that I may be sensitive to what is happening to our fair daughters and handsome sons. I'm picking up the wand again on the depictions of mothers in the media. This morning, however I turn my attentions to teenage pregnancy.
My wife and I (both who became parents at a young age, though a year and three months after we were married) were discussing a new mom that she had the night before in the hospital. My wife works as a nurse in the mother/baby unit of the nearby hospital in Provo, UT. The particular new mom was young, not even old enough to drive a car. The father was not even old enough to hold a minimum wage job. If in high school, that would only make them sophomores, and just barely at that. The child would have been conceived in their freshman year.
That teenage pregnancy now occurs with increased frequency across the U.S. , from Alaska to New England, and right here in Utah Valley, clearly points to our national media. The media is what unifies our country, and it is also what is destroying the fabric of moral decency that has, in times past, made the United States distinct from the rest of the world. Not any more.1
I would continue to discuss the plague and its effects if I felt that was the answer. But it is not and this is why: teaching and modeling righteousness is more effective than treating the malady and depicting its consequences. Pres. Boyd K. Packer, an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has said that behaviors change when we teach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, instead of teaching how to change behaviors. In our media, we're not going to change a youth's perspective on teenage pregnancy by making movies about teens getting pregnant and showing the consequences (and God forbid that we would do it for entertainment value).