J.C. Watts: “Across our Nation parents are engaged in a daily struggle for the hearts and minds and souls of their children. Their…”

“Across our Nation parents are engaged in a daily struggle for the hearts and minds and souls of their children. Their struggle is with an American culture which, under the protection of our constitutional freedoms, too often expresses these freedoms in a message of moral, ethical and sexual liberation that reaches even our youngest children. Through television and advertising, through the Internet and other sophisticated methods of communication, our children are bombarded with these messages, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt; messages which celebrate immoral behavior, messages which promote promiscuity, messages over which we, as parents and adults, have little or no control. The struggle against these influences is particularly difficult to working parents who have discovered that between the hours of 3 p.m. in the afternoon, when school lets out, and 6 o'clock in the evening, when they get home from work, we have allowed the development of an adult-free, supervision-free culture. Studies have shown this is the time when teenagers experiment with drugs, commit juvenile crime, and engage in sexual activity.”