{"id":6605,"date":"2006-08-04T13:14:15","date_gmt":"2006-08-04T13:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/summer-supervision.html"},"modified":"2006-08-04T13:14:15","modified_gmt":"2006-08-04T13:14:15","slug":"summer-supervision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/summer-supervision.html","title":{"rendered":"Summer Supervision"},"content":{"rendered":"

These ads have caused quite a stir in the Hoosier state – the "Summer Supervision" campaign from the Indiana Department of Child Services.<\/a><\/p>\n

They are three, all filmed as faux<\/em> home video shoots. One is of a mother brining a birthday cake into a pool party and discovering a drowned child. Another is of a father who is bathing a child, is called away to the phone, and the child drowns (why the mother holding the video camera doesn’t stick around to watch the child, I’ll never know), and the third is of a woman being awakened from dozing on the couch with her babe in arms and discovering that the baby isn’t breathing.<\/p>\n

Never sleep with an infant, even for a moment, because a moment is all it takes.."<\/em><\/p>\n

Now, the point of this post is not to get into co-sleeping wars, but that culminating statement is  really just a lie – You doze off for a moment<\/em>, and the baby is suffocated? Really?  Maybe if you’re obese and drunk and\/or medicated, but really. <\/p>\n

So, you can fight about co-sleeping if you will (formerly known as the "family bed" – I’m not an ideologue about it at all and am wary, to say the least of making a political\/and\/or cultural statement about it, but I will say that this thing I have always done – not because I want to but because it just makes more sense, and honestly, my babies always slept better in the early months when they were with me, and thank you very much, Michael Jacob sleeps all alone in his crib for eleven hours at a stretch now, so no crippling of the psyche there.) …but the hot issue here is the commercials themselves. They’re rather shocking, even after you’ve seen them a couple of times. They’re playing all the time – if you watch the early evening news, you’ll see at least one.<\/p>\n

I’m not against shocking or startling images, especially if we need to be shocked into awareness. But I’m not sure about these. As usual, I don’t know how to articulate it, but I think it has something to do with the fact that they’re fake. No, I’m not saying, show me a real<\/em>  video of the discovery of a drowned child. I’m saying, there’s an element of manipulation here that I think people resent.<\/p>\n

But…maybe it will save a child’s life? I don’t know, because I think people dumb enough to leave a little child unattended in a bathtub aren’t too easily taught, anyway.<\/p>\n

Opinions?<\/p>\n

Update:<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

Someone in the comments boxes compares them to the Volkswagon commercial where the guys are talking and then BAM – they crash. Good call. <\/p>\n

Update: <\/u><\/strong>Speaking of faux-realistic ads that feature trauma to children, go to this page and watch the last ad on the page – for Mercy Children’s Hospital in Toledo. Wait for the last line of the ad. Crass? Tacky? Produced in a drug-induced brain lapse? How would you describe it? <\/a> (Hat tip Kevin!)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These ads have caused quite a stir in the Hoosier state – the "Summer Supervision" campaign from the Indiana Department of Child Services. They are three, all filmed as faux home video shoots. One is of a mother brining a birthday cake into a pool party and discovering a drowned child. Another is of a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSummer Supervision - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/08\/summer-supervision.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Summer Supervision - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"These ads have caused quite a stir in the Hoosier state – the "Summer Supervision" campaign from the Indiana Department of Child Services. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. 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