Clinton's shame stuns our kids

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 28, 1998 | by Timothy W. Maier

"We have an opportunity to talk with children about character, about leadership; to hold up role models in American history," Morrison adds. "We should make it clear to our children despite what liars-for-hire say on TV that they don't all do it -- that it is important to keep your word, tell the truth and keep your vows."

Children are being exposed at an early age to topics that parents hoped to deal with much later. They are learning, Morrison says, "that the vulgar phrase we use for sex is the vulgar phrase we use for betrayal." Some adults may trivialize such lessons, but many teens already get it. "My 15-year-old daughter says [Clinton] sounds like a teenager by finding someone else to blame," Dunlap reports.

What about preteens? Diving for the remote control to stop the avalanche of scandalous news won't ward off the tales carried by your children's friends. "It's everywhere" says Shepherd Smith, president of the Washington-based Institute for Youth Development and a nationally known expert on risks facing today's young people. "It's discussed in every household in America." says Smith, whose son attends Herndon Elementary School in Northern Virginia, where Clinton recently spoke. Smith says a leader of his son's Boy Scout troop offered this lesson: "When no one is watching, you do what is right. That's the real test"

But Dunlap worries this scandal could lead to "more promiscuity" Parents fear a replay of the Waco, Texas, high-school incident in which a teacher stepped out of her classroom for a few minutes and returned to find a 16-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl engaging in oral sodomy in front of their classmates. That was in January, just after the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke.

Judith Wagner, director of Broadoaks Children School near Los Angeles and a Whittier College professor of child development and education, says she doubts the scandal will impact preteens. Her students did inquire about the infamous dress, she says, noting that one asked, "How come that girl doesn't take her clothes to the cleaners?" Wagner adds, "Everyone thinks these kids are so sophisticated; they are as clueless as I was. They know some basic birds and bees, but they even have to have that confirmed."

A 10-year-old boy got his "presidential spills mixed up when he asked, `Did the president throw up on someone again?'" Wagner says. "The younger children we work with have been more interested in the lie vs. truth aspect of the story. Here again, they've gotten their history a bit confused. One 6-year-old boy said, `Now that the president man has lied again, he has to cut down some more berry trees'" Confusion is not gender-specific. A first-grade girl said she believed there's a famous painting of Lewinsky smiling in a museum. The Whittier education professor says, `Tit least she got Mona Lisa's initials right!"

Wagner reports that few young children seem to be "traumatized by [the scandal], and they certainly don't seem to be saying, `Well, if the president can do it, I can do it.' So it does not seem to be creeping into their own developing moral and ethical codes" She even doubts the scandal will hurt children's sense of their president as a hero, because "far too many of them could not even tell you his name or identify him in a group of pictures. I worry that this generation's heroes are more likely to be Beavis and Butthead...."