THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
March 8, 1996
Remarks by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton
to the Parent Teachers Association
Arlington, VA
MRS. CLINTON: Thank you so much. I am just delighted to be
here. I want you to know just how much I appreciated that
introduction, but I want your board to know how much all of us
appreciate Joan's representation of you. She has done an
excellent job of conveying the positions of the PTA, the concerns
that parents and teachers have, to the President and everyone
else.
I think that the PTA's leadership and dedication to issues
on behalf of children has always been important, but it's perhaps
even more important now -- more than at any point in your
history. I believe that because we have many forces at work, not
only in our country but around the world, many of which are very
positive, many of which really do open up possibilities for
countless numbers of people. We are learning so much about the
way the human brain develops that it will give us so many more
good ideas about how to help children and how to teach
effectively at home and in the schools. But at the same time that
so many good things are happening, we would be foolish indeed if
we did not recognize that there are many challenges, many risks
and many difficulties as well in the world that we face and that
our children are being brought up in. And so a kind of commitment
to partnership, to taking stands on behalf of parents and
children and education that the PTA has long been known for is
especially critical today. I can think of many examples, but I
will only mention a few.
On behalf of the President and the Administration, I will
begin by applauding you for your leadership in the effort to
combat teen-age smoking. The PTA has helped the Department of
Health and Human Services promote the "Stop the Sale" program
against tobacco smoking targeted at children. And your
partnership in the new National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids
makes you an indispensable ally in what the President is
attempting to do. I think that this battle against tobacco is
especially important because we know that 3,000 children a day
pick up the habit of smoking. We know that children have been
targeted. In my book, which I've referred to, I talk about the
evidence -- overwhelming evidence -- we have about how the
tobacco companies have turned their marketing influences on our
children. And I think it tells us something that is important to
know.
There is always a tension in our society between those who
have the right to advocate and sell their products in our free
market system and the rest of us who, both individually and
together, sometimes have to protect ourselves and particularly
our children against certain products and against the
consumer-culture emphasis of those products. And there is no
clearer example of this than smoking. And I thank you on behalf
not only of the President, but on behalf of my daughter and her
friends and all of our children today. This will not be easily
done.
Joan and I were talking before when we came in about the
conference yesterday that the President hosted on youth and
violence. And that was particularly focused on illegal drug
usage, and we know that that was a great challenge to us. But
tobacco smoking we also know is a gateway experience for other
destructive experiences such as illegal drug usage. So by
focusing on the tobacco industry's efforts to entice children to
smoke we are also saying don't use our children for other kinds
of dangerous activities as well.
As some of you I'm sure know, the President and the Vice
President held a closed-door meeting with executives from the
entertainment industry. All networks were represented, all the
cable stations, all the major movie studios, to discuss with the
industry their willingness to create a voluntary rating system.
This would never had happened if the telecommunications bill had
not included the V-chip. And for many, many years the PTA, and
now a lot of other individuals and groups, have been raising the
alarm about the content of television. And many of us have tried
in our own homes to control what our children see, but we know
that that is often only half the battle. Because even for my
friends who are part-time homemakers, they don't watch their
children 24 hours a day. They don't follow their children to
their friend's homes. They know that their children are being
exposed to things that they wish that they were not. So it's a
constant effort on the part of parents to reassert authority in
our own homes. And to stick behind the entertainment industry to
move toward voluntary ratings combined with the V-chip will give
parents an enormous tool that we don't now have.
Even before the V-chip can be put into television sets,
which won't start for about two years, the ratings system, which
is supposed to be available as of next January or earlier, will
give parents more information than they've had up until now. We
won't have the convenience of the V-chip, but at least we can try
to exercise more vigilance because of that.
After the closed-door meeting and the press announcement by
the President, the next day the President and the Vice President
and Tipper Gore and I met with some PTA members and some children
and some experts to talk about how we would actually implement
this V-chip and ratings system in our homes. It was a great
discussion because many parents have been reading your media
guides, have been having meetings about this. Some of the active
chapters that have made a real outreach effort, not only through
PTA meetings but through community and neighborhood meetings as
well, were able to describe what has been done up until now. I
think that when we had the conversation, one of the most telling
comments that was made was made by a young boy, 10 years old, who
came to this event with his parents, and he was very upset
because he's worried about younger children. And, you know, he
knows what he's supposed to watch and what he's not supposed to
watch. And he knows it's not real, but it's these little kids,
and I quote, "Just pretend they are Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
or the X-Men and then they'll just go around pretending they're
killing each other or such things and think nothing of it." And I
thought that was pretty astute observation, even though he was
talking about those little people, four and five years of age.
But at that same meeting there was a very impressive
statement by Dr. Robert Phillips of the American Psychiatric
Association, who explained, and it wasn't so much for the Gores
or my husband and me because we already believe this, but it was
in part to convey this to the media that was covering the event
-- that children are like little VCR's, they see something once
and then they repeat it and they repeat it over and over and over
again. I don't think there is any doubt any longer, and I go on
at some length in my book to try to make this point so it could
be more popularly available to people. All the studies that have
been done, they've all concluded the same thing -- that violence
does desensitize our children, the repetitiveness of it, the
unreality of it.
And in addition we are now getting research that the kind of
presentation of family life on television, the dysfunctionality
in the comedy series, in the talk shows is also undermining
children's sense of what a family should be. So there isn't, I
think, any room for argument about the way the content of
television affects our children.
I also, though, would like to add a word that I believe the
process of television watching is also damaging to our children.
We now know that television watching is a much more passive
activity than reading, for example. You burn more calories when
you read. I'm thinking about a new campaign. You know, "lose
weight by reading." There might be something in that. And so we
know that the passivity of it has affected children.
We also know that the instant gratification that it conveys
undermines children's willingness to stick to hard tasks and to
try to learn the things that don't come easily because you can
just hit the remote control when you're watching television. And
many of my friends who are teachers tell me they feel like
they're clicked off all the time because a lot of learning is
simply hard, boring, repetitive work. And our children have got
to, once again, understand that schoolwork is their work and that
it's not television that should consume most of their hours. So I
hope that the progress that you have made in raising these issues
gives you a lot of satisfaction, because I'm convinced that we
would not be able to point to the success of the V-chip and this
ratings system, we would not have launched this campaign against
tobacco's influence on our children if it had not been for the
work that you have done in so many of your efforts, both locally,
at the state level and nationally.
Having said that, there is still a lot ahead of us to do.
Certainly the work you've done on the critical media viewing
project has got to be spread more widely, and I urge you to do
all that you can to reach as many parents as possible. Too many
parents still don't know what you know about how best to watch
television together as a family. Too many parents still don't
know what so many of you knew and did with your own children and
which you advocate -- the kind of talking to children and reading
to children that helped prepare children for school -- things
that cannot be done if the television set is on form seven to 11
hours on average in the family home. So the more we can reach out
in a helpful way to help parents be the best mothers and fathers
they can be, the more likely we are to strengthen families and to
help our children become resilient, productive young people.
So on my behalf, and certainly for the President and all who
care about these issues, I want to thank you for your leadership.
I want to thank you for your support on behalf of these important
issues and I also want to ask you to stay as committed as you
are, because I think we're finally getting an audience again. I
don't know that we had one for a while there. People were not
listening. But the PTA is growing again in many areas of the
country. Parents are once again understanding what their primary
obligations are. Schools are opening themselves more readily to
parental involvement. So I see the convergence of a lot of good
things that are coming to pass, and we just have to make sure
that they continue and grow and give more and more parents and
teachers the tools they need to make life better for our
children. Thank you very much.
Return to List of
General Speeches By The First Lady
|
