It seems that in the ever evolving world of media, parents are asking for more and more things to be censored so that their children aren’t exposed to things they deem inappropriate. What these parents don’t realize is that there is already enough tools available to them to control what their child plays, watches, and hears at home.

For example, if parents take a look at their TV options and controls, it’s almost a guarantee that there will be some sort of parental controls on it to restrict what your children watch. There are entire sites and articles dedicated to how to put a restriction on certain channels by forcing children to enter a four digit pin to access the channel. Parents can block shows by what rating they are, during a certain time period, or block individual channels/shows for their children.

It’s not like this is difficult to do either. There are tutorial videos on the Internet that will easily show the process of how to set up parental controls. Parents could even call their local TV provider and ask how to set up parental controls if they didn’t have access to a computer or the Internet. Parents continue to receive more and more tools to control what their child does while they are unsupervised, yet some parents still complain that the shows need to be censored. It’s now the fault of the parents if their children watch things that are inappropriate for their age, as it is their inability to learn the options available to them that causes this to happen.

As for video games, it is incredibly simple to restrict what your children play. There are rating systems for all published games that will give parents information on what kind of things are in the game, such as violence or alcohol. Steam (an online gaming platform) already has parental controls built into the application that can be turned on by a couple clicks in settings. Most gaming consoles (such as Xbox One, PS4, or the Wii U) also have parental controls that can be enabled by going into the system settings, which allows parents to restrict what their children play at any time of day. If parents don’t want to turn on parental controls, they could simply unplug the console and hide it somewhere if they are gone during the day. There are so many solutions to restricting what children play that it’s ridiculous for parents to ask for the TV shows and video games to censor their content.

Media is not the issue anymore: it’s the awareness of the parents that is the issue. If parents really want to restrict what their children experience, then that is OK, but as of now going to the media to complain has become a thing of the past.