Husbands and Dads

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Many fathers wonder how to keep their children safe from the influence of the media.  We want our children to be protected from inappropriate material.  How do we do that?  Mary and Mike from Brudis and Brudette have some ideas:

I really like media. But, I also really hate all the garbage that’s so often mixed in with it. I think this is probably something that a lot of people struggle with – wanting to enjoy watching, listening and playing – but not wanting to expose ourselves or our families to, well, crap.  Mike and I have some pretty solid ideas about how we handle this conundrum, so I thought I’d just share how we do things and some resources we use that might be of use to some of you out there in the blogosphere.

Movies at Home
Movies are definitely my favorite kind of media. Sometimes, all I want to do is just veg on the couch and pop in a movie. But I don’t want to hear any swearing, or see any sex, nudity, or too much violence. So that eliminates almost any non G-rated movie. Our solution? “ClearPlay,” one of our very favorite inventions. ClearPlay is a company that makes a DVD player that edits out all the crap, without editing the actual movie (hence it doesn’t infringe on copyright laws and is perfectly legal). The company doesn’t edit movies, they simply produce the filters that you use with the movies you buy or rent. We have our ClearPlay DVD player, and a “Filter Stick” (which is just a USB drive). All we have to do is periodically download the latest filters from the ClearPlay website, and we can watch practically any movie we want. Not only does it mute out swears, but it actually cuts out entire scenes that are inappropriate – and we can set the filtering to the level we want. So I can watch all my chick flicks that I love – but I don’t have to watch the sex scenes. We can watch a cool action movie with substantially less violence, etc. The DVD player was $60, and you do have to subscribe to be able to download the latest filters, but it’s only a few bucks a month. We got our player at Macey’s grocery store, but you can also check out their website: Clearplay.com.

At the Movies
Of course there’s no fix like that in the movie theater, and how do you know before you go to see a movie if there’s stuff you won’t like in it? Another great website – ScreenIt.com – is a great tool we use. You can look up any movie on ScreenIt and it will tell you exactly how much and what kind of profanity, violence, sex, scary scenes, etc. are in it, including movies that were just released in theaters. Before Mike and I will go see any movie (except G-rated ones), we check the website and see what it has in it. I think it’s easy to become desensitized to what’s in movies, but because of ClearPlay, Mike and I are actually SUPER sensitive to all the crap, since we never see/hear it. Because of that, if a movie has ANY profanity/sex, etc, in it, we we usually just wait until it comes out on DVD and watch it with ClearPlay. That usually means that we don’t see any PG-13 (and even some PG) movies in the theater, but we’ve learned patience, and usually don’t mind waiting.
*Note: if you go to the screenit.com website, it will look like you have to pay for the service. You don’t. Just scroll down to the very bottom and you’ll see a little “No Thanks” button – and you’ll go on to the website. You can pay a monthly fee – but that’s only to have access to info on brand new movies as soon as they come out. However, it usually only takes a week or so before the ‘new’ movies are available to non-paying visitors.

TV
We used to have a cool thing called TV Guardian that muted out profanity on tv shows as well as movies, but for some technical reason that Mike would be able to tell you, it doesn’t work with our current setup. So for TV shows that have stuff we don’t like in them, we usually do the same thing we do with movies – wait until they come out on DVD. Here again, ClearPlay is our best friend. They also do TV series! This waiting takes A LOT more patience though, since we have to wait for the series to end, THEN for it to come out on DVD. *sigh* For instance, we love “The Office,” but we only just barely saw the third season, since it just came out on DVD. We do still watch TV, but we mostly just watch ESPN (Mike), HGTV (Mary), Discovery and The History Channel. We also are occasionally American Idol junkies. If anyone can figure out a way to buy cable a la carte, as in just buying the channels you want, sign me up! We have a million channels we never watch and it feels like such a waste!

Internet
The internet has it’s own special kind of crap – called pornography – that is especially vile. Neither Mike nor I want pornography to be available in our home – regardless of whether or not we would actually look at it. We don’t even want the possibility. Our friend here is a program/website called K9 Web Protection. K9 is a free program that you can download that will protect your family from the majority of bad internet stuff. One person in the household (usually the wife/mother) has the password (yes, Mike doesn’t know our K9 password) and holds the power. With it I can block any website I want, any keywords I want, and make it so the internet can’t be accessed past a certain time without the password. That means that if I tried to look up anything with the word ‘sex’ (or a plethora of other words) in the search phrase or website address, a K9 screen will pop up (complete with barking sound) and tell me I can’t proceed. I can also see all the websites that have been visited (and they can’t be deleted by deleting history or anything else). I think this will be extra useful when we have older kids, but it also gives me a sense of security now. It’s so easy to think “That can’t happen to us” or “My husband would never do that.” Don’t give temptation the chance. That’s my theory anyway.

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