Remarks at Glendale Community College in Glendale, California

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, June 17, 1996

All of this is very important for its own sake, but it's especially important if you think about all the problems and challenges our children are facing today. When I leave you, I'm going to Albuquerque to talk about some things that I try to do to help people raise their children more safety. Albuquerque, like' Long Beach, California, has adopted a school uniform program. And that's reducing violence and increasing learning, an important discipline in a lot of schools. There will be people there from Las Cruces, New Mexico, which, like New Orleans and a lot of other cities, has adopted a curfew policy which has dramatically reduced violence and crime among juveniles and helped parents to support their children. These are the kinds of things that I think we have to be alert to.

I also think there's some more things that Washington has to do. This is not very popular when I started it, and it's still unpopular in some places when we became the first administration ever to ask the tobacco industry to undergo regulations in terms of the advertising targeted at children. But you need to know that it is illegal in every State in America for children under the age of 18 to smoke. Every day - every single day - 3,000 kids start smoking and 1,000 of them will die sooner because of cancer, emphysema, heart disease or some other smoking-related problem. That is a stunning thing. That's the biggest single health problem in America. So I believe we have to keep working on it.

Now, California, way back in 1988, passed something called Proposition 99, which emphasized educating children about the danger of tobacco. I hope you will stay in the forefront of that, and I hope you will support me. We should not be spending hundreds of millions - maybe billions - of dollars a year to advertise to children to do something that's illegal, that's going to take a third of them out of this life sooner than they ought to leave. It is wrong. It is not right.

One other thing I want to mention that I think affects a lot of parents who are particularly busy is that more and more of our children are spending more and more of their time in front of the television instead of with their parents or in other places. Now, I've worked hard with the entertainment industry, and I want to compliment them for agreeing to develop a system of voluntary ratings for television programs to help parents in dealing with the exposure that their young children might have to programs with excessive violence or other improper content.

And the entertainment industry, much of which is here in California, deserves a lot of credit for doing this. They did it entirely voluntarily. We got the Congress to pass something called the V-chip, which will go into television sets which will enable parents to control that. And I think that's a positive thing.

But there's one other issue that I want to mention which is that I have been trying now, for some time, to get a few hours a week keep in mind, kids watch about 4 hours a day of television on average - I've been trying to get the Federal Communications Commission for a year to just say that 3 hours a week ought to be devoted to children's educational programming by every network in the country. I believe that. I think it would be a good thing.