“South Park is a horrible influence on my children!”

“Rick and Morty is inappropriate and makes jokes about genitals!”

Yeah, of course it does. Why else would it only air on Adult Swim?

People have been calling for shows like South Park, or Rick and Morty, or Family Guy, to be pulled from air or canceled since they first aired. Many complain  that shows like these promote hatred and violence in the world and that children may be “corrupted” by their content. In reality, the creators of these shows are actually brilliant and know how to depict real world problems using satire and absurdist humor to bring taboo topics, like sex or hatred, into the spotlight for discussion.

While talking about genitals might not be appropriate for, say, Nickelodeon, or Disney XD, they instead air on a TV channel that makes it so clear they have adult-only content that they even put the word “Adult” in their name. Of course it likely isn’t going to be a good influence on our children, because it airs late at night when kids are asleep and on a TV channel made for mature people. 

I always question why some parents freak out over their child watching a mature show, and jump straight to the conclusion that the worst possible scenario will come out of it. Instead of hiding mature content from their children, it would be much better parenting to allow their children to watch these shows (perhaps not too much) and if they can handle the mature content, that is a sign of growing up, and parents should be proud of that. And if they can’t handle the mature content, a sufficient talk or discipline will do. It is not the fault of the show creators for putting out content they are best at making and are what they love doing. 

The irony behind parents shielding their children from mature content is that oftentimes they’ll try too hard to hide it. It makes their curious kids actually want to sneak into the living room at night just to put it on and see what the whole fuss is about. Every child reaches a moment in their life when they find out how babies are made, or who exactly Santa Claus is. The ability to handle mature content, especially at a young age actually shows signs of growing up, of one’s progression in life. When parents shield a responsible child from what they are absolutely ready for, that is regression, a.k.a. growing down.

In the season 11 premiere “With Apologies to Jesse Jackson,” the show illustrates the heated debate surrounding the N-word slur. Randy Marsh blurts out the word on national television, sparking a giant outrage against him and the Marsh family. The word is said uncensored 42 times. Surprisingly, the episode actually gained highly positive reviews, particularly from the NAACP, where members Kovon and Jill Flowers stated, “This show, in it’s own comedic way, is helping people to educate the power of this word, and how it can feel to have hate language directed at you.”

Dark humor is critical to bringing taboo subjects into conversation in our society and is a way of commenting on problems in our society through satire, a viable method of portraying the weaknesses of our world. A child dropping the F bomb may be startling, but it’d be more damaging to find anything that might’ve given the child the idea to say that, and demand it be taken off the air when in 10 years from then, it won’t even matter because that child will be in high school.