In the 1990s Rod Dreher was working as a professional film critic who reviewed numerous films with graphic violence. But just before the birth of his first child, he went from watching eight to 10 movies a week to almost none. One day while holding his newborn son he started watching a well-known film, but then he quickly turned it off, sickened by the violence. What changed? Dreher writes:

I had become a father, that's what. I could not sit in my armchair cradling that fragile newborn boy in my arms, and watch human beings savaged on the screen …. Welcoming a baby into our home taught me [how obscene] violence can be. I once took pleasure in watching this kind of thing. Now, something within me said no, this is unclean.

I had not realized how desensitized I had become merely by constant exposure to movies that were brutal, and featured torrents of profanity and coarse sexuality. What I thought was normal was not normal at all, or at least not morally sane, not in any world I wanted my son to grow up in.

We parents are the primary educators of our children, and, with the community, responsible for the culture that shapes their minds and hearts. If our careless media consumption causes us to lose sight of the good, the true, and the beautiful, can we trust ourselves to teach our children well? …. Should we pay more critical attention to our kids' media habits, especially regarding violence? Absolutely. But children aren't the only ones in the home who need that discipline.