L'Indipendente

I have a teenage daughter. Like many girls of the same age, she likes to watch Disney Channel's TV series: High School Musical, Zack & Cody, Waverly Place, Lizzie McGuire, Hannah Montana, Raven, Camp Rock, just to mention fews. Since she watches the tube in the dining room where I often work with my laptop, I had the possibility to gain some experience about those serials.

I have no idea of what is really the lifestyle of teenagers in USA since I live in Italy, but what really impressed me is the superficiality and lack of culture of most of the characters in those series. In a world were millions people are fighting for survival against real problems, these girls and boys are worried by nonsense and waste time and money in useless and frivolous activities.

Of course, nobody pretends that our children be always worried about famine, Aids, global warming, poverty, and many other problems involving billions of people in the planet, nor we expect that they be only committed to humanitarian initiatives. Children have the right to have a good time, since once they are adults they will have little chances to enjoy life. However, I wonder which values our children might learn watching at those TV series.

Furthermore, those characters are not only quite childish, but they live in a dream false world. Their families have few or no economical problems, live in wonderful houses, and they have whatever they want. Practically, they are beautiful and rich: the traditional American model of the winner. The reality is that 37 millions people in USA are extremely poor, that is, 12.7% of the total population, the higher percentage among industrialized countries. Furthermore 45.8 millions people, 15.8% of the total population, have no health insurance coverage at all.

For many years the Disney Corporation defined very severe policies to ensure that their movies would be ethically and politically correct. In fact you can see in those series children belonging to different ethnic groups being friends and playing together, you never hear swearwords, you see no violence at all, and sex is limited to very harmless kisses. But is it really ethically correct to show to children a world where the major problem a teenager may have is to decide which prom dresses he or she might like?

I will not ask my daughter to stop watching at those series. I want that she develop a good critical ability. So I let her to watch them but when I can, I draw her attention to any inconsistency, nonsense, stereotype, prejudice, and unrealistic behaviour existing in those television programs. And sometimes, at the end of the show, we debate about what happened and why, and what it would really happen in the real world. Nevertheless, from this point of view, those series are absolutely instructive, but probably not for the same reasons the Disney's scriptwriters intended them.