Too many children now and for at least a couple decades have grown up in homes where TVs, phones, and video games are used as perpetual babysitters and where children spend more time with and are more influenced by teachers than they are by their parents. If we want to renew this country, that has to change.
Parenting is one of the most difficult jobs possible, but it is also one of the most rewarding. Because in America we tend to prioritize convenience and comfort, many parents have fallen into bad habits of allowing their children excessive time with online media or unsupervised school because it’s easier. That is setting children up for failure. If your child can’t function without constant digital entertainment, or if their upbringing is handled by leftist government employees, don’t be surprised when they turn out a woke mess Voila, modern America.
For example, a show that has been promoted for years on Netflix to kids has drawn new scrutiny for glorifying transgenderism and demons. Dead End: Paranormal Park, from 2022, ran for two seasons. It has a main character who is somehow both “transgender” and homosexual, not to mention his demon friend, and is rated “TV-Y7,” or suitable for children ages seven and older. While the show is not new, its continued presence on Netflix is once again highlighting how parents are foolish to let their children spend so much time on streaming platforms — most of the big entertainment companies are deliberately trying to corrupt kids. Cartoons have been growing uglier and more vile over the years, and it inevitably turned into the worst sort of trash for children’s consumption.
OMG. Dead End Paranormal Park, a show on Netflix, is pushing pro-transgender on CHILDREN.
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 29, 2025
This show is advertised for 7-YEAR-OLDS
It’s being promoted on @netflix kids now.
Parents- BEWARE pic.twitter.com/gh5UZftKns
Even some parents who want their children to read will allow them to read any kind of trashy nonsense, like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, as if merely looking at words on paper makes one more intelligent. As regards schooling, parents are more aware now of how much their schools are radicalizing kids, which is how Charlie Kirk’s shooter, Tyler Robinson, became a nutcase, but even more parents need to be not only aware, but very invested in addressing the issue. The list is long: incredibly explicit sex ed, pornographic LGBTQ propaganda, anti-American history, woke literature.
Soon after Kirk’s assassination, a Texas charter school teacher told PJ Media that kids are desensitized by pop entertainment and “teachers spend more time with the kids than any parent does. So if your major role models encourage violence based on opinion,” and “if you’re told words are equivalent to violent acts … then there’s no differences between shooting someone and saying your opinions.” That message is coming to kids from TikTok and all the other social media platforms, from teachers, from TV shows, from some of their favorite celebrities, etc. Parents need to have much more control over kids’ entertainment, electronics, and activities — and maybe consider more family outings that involve history, the outdoors, religion, or anything that encourages physical and mental development.
One of my least favorite sights at historic monuments from Mt. Vernon and the Jefferson Memorial to the Louvre and Dublin Castle are the children and teens who will walk around some of the most beautiful and/or important structures in the world while staring fixedly at their phones or tablets the entire time. Forget the Mona Lisa or the Discoveries Monument, kids need to see their 200th TikTok dance of the day. The worst part is that in many cases, the parents deliberately give the devices to their young children because they don’t want to try to engage the kids with the monuments or art; they simply want to look around while pretending they don’t have a kid with them.
This is a phenomenon even discoverable now at live shows. I went to Les Miserables here in Arizona, and the family behind us left after the first act because the teens wore headphones and fiddled with phones the entire time, asking every minute or so what was going on. At Disneyland Paris, the group of young girls next to me at a live Lion King musical and acrobatics show saw practically nothing because they were typing on their phones the entire time. They were literally incapable of interacting with the real world even in an entertainment scenario. And employers wonder why Gen Z are no good as employees.
Parents have been too ready to resign their roles to machines or other people. For some it is because they prioritize their own romances and careers above their families; for others it’s just because they are lazy; for still others it is because they are pseudo-socialists who think the government should raise their kids. The end result is universally pernicious. It produces ill-mannered, depressed, dysfunctional, lazy, undisciplined, uneducated, and unpatriotic children. If America is to be great again, the reform starts in the family.
As Charlie Kirk would say, “Get married. Have children. Be courageous. Leave a legacy.”
