No surprise, really. After all, the surgeon was extracting seven teeth from the mouth of my 12-year-old daughter. Despite the fact that three of those were baby teeth, the risks of the procedure apparently are legion. With all the paperwork, I wasn’t sure if I would find the tooth fairy or medical malpractice attorney Sam Bernstein in the parking lot when we were finished.

Of course, it would have been different if the procedure had been something insignificant and safe, lacking in any long-term physical or emotional ramifications, such as abortion.

For that, a minor girl can maintain her “right to privacy,” and her folks don’t necessarily need to sign a thing. That’s because 14 states plus the District of Columbia allow teens to get abortions without parental consent, and Planned Parenthood’s health counselors are adept at getting around the laws of the 35 states that do require parental consent or notification with a judicial bypass. (Utah has no bypass option.)

Thus, Planned Parenthood assures it never loses a sale.

Oops. Make that, assures that all girls get the “health care” they need.

As it happens, Planned Parenthood is so committed to securing profits — er, sorry — providing health care services to teen girls that it’s willing to skirt the laws of various states to do so, even laws intended to protect those girls from unhealthy, unsafe and illegal abuse at the hands of adults.

Recently, Live Action, a youth-led new-media pro-life organization, released a hidden-camera video showing Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin ignoring the sexual abuse of a 14-year-old minor by a 31-year-old partner. (Watch it at www.liveaction.org.)

Posing as a 14-year-old, Live Action President Lila Rose, who in fact is a college student, claimed she was pregnant by her “much older” boyfriend. Disclosing this fact should have triggered a reporting process required by the state in all cases in which girls younger than 16 — Wisconsin’s age of consent — disclose that they are sexually active.

Instead, Live Action’s video shows the Planned Parenthood worker explaining that the situation doesn’t necessarily have to be reported. “Was it consensual?” she asks, as if a sexual relationship between a 31-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl can ever be considered consensual and, therefore, appropriate.

Not only does the Planned Parenthood worker indicate that the state’s reporting requirement can be avoided, she also assures the 14-year-old that she can get around Wisconsin’s adult-consent requirement by using the bypass option. For free.

Never mind that Wisconsin doesn’t even specify that consent be provided by no one but a girl’s parents. A grandparent, aunt, uncle or sibling older than 25 can sign the release to allow an abortion for a teen girl. Still, at no time in the encounter did the Planned Parenthood worker ask the girl if there was a trusted adult family member to whom she could turn.

She did, however, ask if the 31-year-old boyfriend was going to pay for the abortion.

Excuse me while I turn down the sound on that cash register.

Ms. Rose says the Wisconsin case is typical of what Live Action finds at Planned Parenthood sites across the country. “What’s common is for their workers to assure that any hurdles to abortion can be crossed,” she says.

Not to worry about those pesky laws designed to protect young women who obviously already are engaged in high-risk behaviors. Planned Parenthood is happy to provide the quick fix and send them back into the arms of their “much older” boyfriends. The ones with the fat wallets.

A pregnant teen needs help and support, to be sure. At this critical junction, Planned Parenthood ought to promote every means possible to assure that her parents are responsible for her care — perhaps more responsible than they have ever been — and to protect her from sexual abuse.

But where’s the profit margin there?

The nation’s home-based child care providers represent millions of single business owners — women, mostly — whose entrepreneurial spirit and operating ingenuity are surpassed only by their willingness to clean the noses and backsides of other people’s children.

In Michigan, roughly 40,000 such day care owners were perhaps too busy changing diapers, reading stories and making lunches to notice a random piece of mail in which they were invited to declare themselves unionized state employees.

Obviously, a private business owner cannot be an employee of the government. But the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) couldn’t resist the lure of so many potential dues-paying members.

So AFSCME hatched a grand scheme. Suppose you declare that any child care provider whose clients receive state subsidies for day care are considered employees of the state? You’d instantly have 40,000 new state employees to add to the rolls of union membership.

Follow the union’s logic: Say you own and operate Granny’s Junction Daycare. A few of your clients attend job-retraining programs that qualify them for subsidized child care benefits. Along with the money that is paid directly to you from these clients, you receive a check each month from the state to pay some of their expenses.

This makes you … wait for it … a state employee. “Close enough for government work” never rang so true.

To accomplish this surreptitious unionization effort, Michigan’s Department of Human Services (DHS) formed an agency called the Michigan Home Based Child Care Council (MHBCCC). This agency does exactly nothing. In fact, it isn’t even funded by the Michigan Legislature. But MHBCCC is an entity against which a union may organize.

Enter AFSCME’s new “faux” union, Child Care Workers Together (CCWT). The new union sends election ballots to those 40,000 potential members (formerly known as small-business owners), encouraging them to unionize. About 6,000 ballots are returned. Interestingly, more than 5,000 favor joining the union, while only 475 oppose it. The other 34,000 threw the thing away, assuming they couldn’t possibly need a union — or be eligible to join one — since they own and operate private businesses.

But wouldn’t you know, those business owners now are paying “union dues,” assessed at 1.15 percent of their monthly subsidies. The annual total withheld and diverted directly to CCWT (read: AFSCME): $3.7 million. Dollars.

Meanwhile, the “employer” doesn’t provide health care benefits, training, insurance, a cup of coffee, a company picnic or any other conceivable attribute of employment, least of all, a full-time paycheck. And the union doesn’t negotiate a contract. It simply lobbies the state to set more preferable subsidy rates.

Suffice to say, the independent child care providers could have hired a lobbyist for a lot less than $3.7 million per year.

Three women are suing the DHS for diverting their child care payments as “union dues,” since they say, “the DHS does not have the constitutional authority to reclassify home-based day care providers, who are business owners and independent contractors, as government employees.”

Their attorney, Patrick Wright of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation (www.mackinac.org), says the implications of the case are broad. “If unions can declare private business owners, such as child care providers, as public employees, simply because they receive secondary payments in the form of subsidies, who is next?”

And what other ramifications might there be? Suppose Granny’s Junction is a Christian day care center, where children learn about Jesus while playing in Granny’s sandbox? If she’s now a state employee, is she barred from promoting a religious preference, even if her beliefs are a reason her clients chose her for child care services?

Thank you, AFSCME, for opening a door the ACLU can walk through.

There’s a reason why unions are on the decline. Most workers don’t need one, and they don’t want one. Least of all a fake union that takes money from honest business owners.

Pointing to the nearly one-third of U.S. children who are either obese or overweight, the administration will pursue a legislative agenda to support its efforts, expanding the federal school-lunch program by $10 billion over 10 years and spending $400 million to bring grocery stores to so-called food deserts, urban and rural areas without adequate food stores.

So I guess this means we’ll now own the corner groceries, right next to our federally owned and operated car dealerships.

Mrs. Obama comes at the issue as a mother. In interviews, she says her pediatrician pulled her aside and encouraged her to improve her family’s health status by initiating portion control, eliminating high-calorie convenience foods and sugary drinks, and getting her daughters moving with more exercise and less TV time.

She listened to her children’s doctor, and her daughters are healthier for it.

Now, the Obamas have committed themselves to eliminating not only the possibility that their daughters might be overweight, but also the entire nation’s childhood obesity health crisis, in the span of one generation.

No one can argue that this would be a good thing, as obesity is almost entirely preventable and contributes to some of the costliest maladies burdening our health care system.

Yet at the same time, Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative was announced, researchers at Ohio State University released a study that shows three factors most effectively reduce the risk of childhood obesity: eating family meals together several times per week, getting adequate sleep and limiting TV time.

Notably, these highly effective, risk-reducing solutions aren’t likely to be influenced by a multibillion-dollar federal government “investment.” In fact, they rely on exactly the tactics Mrs. Obama used — greater parental supervision and more healthful decision-making for one’s own children.

Good intentions aside, a presidential task force isn’t going to do what millions of American parents already don’t do — namely, pull the plug on the 68 percent of kids with televisions in their bedrooms, or on the average 53 hours per week that “Generations M’s” (8-to-18-year-olds) spend engaged with electronic media.

Nor will the task force change the way most families eat. For decades, our federal government already has offered far-reaching programs for nutrition promotion, food subsidies and disease prevention, and as Mrs. Obama points out, these problems are not going away.

On the other hand, we now have an abundance of government Web sites representing the growing nanny state for personal lifestyle support.

It’s worth a tour of the “.gov” cybersphere to see just how involved our federal bureaucracy is in our daily lives. The subject of nutrition alone already enjoys millions of dollars in government Internet attention — never mind the countless publications, pamphlets and educational programs.

In addition to Mrs. Obama’s new LetsMove.gov Web site, we can learn what and how to eat at teamnutrition.usda.gov, mypyramid.gov (another USDA site), healthymeals.nal.usda.gov (yet another USDA site), nifa.usda.gov (the National Institute of Food and Agriculture/Families, Youth and Communities), cnpp.usda.gov (Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion), and USDA’s Food and Nutrition service at fns.usda.gov, among others.

Clearly, there is nothing about eating that the U.S. government isn’t already telling us, so maybe that’s not the problem.

Mrs. Obama is a concerned mother, and she sets a strong example for those who ought to implement many of her proven and effective parenting strategies. I applaud the use of her platform to urge Americans to face the childhood-obesity issue as a way to do a better job of parenting, period.

That’s because it’s not only an obesity crisis we face; it’s a parenting crisis and a crisis of adulthood that has convinced too many Americans that our federal bureaucracy has an appropriate role in teaching us not just how to eat, but how to live.

“What’s the difference between liberals and conservatives?”

Whew. An easy one. I’m just glad she didn’t ask the difference between Democrats and Republicans. That’s harder to explain.

“The short answer is, liberals think government can solve a lot of our problems, while conservatives believe the government should be limited so that people can solve their own problems,” I say.

I offer up a couple of examples of government programs to illustrate the point — the economic stimulus package, “Cash for Clunkers” — but there’s not much time to elaborate as we arrive in the school drop-off lane.

“Well, I’m definitely a conservative,” Amy says as she climbs out of the van. “See ya.”

I’m amused, but not surprised, that my 12-year-old already has decided on a philosophical label. Knowing Amy, it won’t be long before she’s asking me the difference between neo-cons and libertarians or the “Old Right” versus the “New Right.” Clearly, she was sent to us by God to keep us on our toes.

I’m also not surprised to be having a conversation about political theory with one of my children. Call us geeky (we’re OK with that), but we believe it’s crucial to teach our children not only our core religious beliefs, but also our political beliefs. This is what it means to instill our values, and thus, to do the real work of parenting.

Of course, my “civics lesson in a nutshell” doesn’t even begin to articulate the differences between liberals and conservatives in our country today. Beyond the political implications, these labels also describe a general worldview about freedom and responsibility, liberty and license, duty and entitlement.

Lofty stuff for the ride to school, to be sure, but timely nonetheless.

On Wednesday in Alexandria, about 80 conservative leaders, including the heads of some of the nation’s most influential groups on the right, gather to sign a document that has been more than a year in the making called the Mount Vernon Statement. For those of us seeking to pass on our conservative values and ideals to our children, this new document reinvigorates the old — but not outdated — concepts behind the founding of our country.

According to Alfred Regnery, publisher of the American Spectator and a member of the Conservative Action Project, the work group behind the Mount Vernon Statement, its purpose is to articulate the common core values of all facets of the conservative movement.

Recalling the words of the late Russell Kirk, Mr. Regnery says, “The Constitution is the most successful conservative document in the history of the world.”

Even so, he concedes the Constitution can be daunting to read, while the Mount Vernon Statement simply defines a set of guiding principles as old as the republic and that will be relevant years from now, just as it is today. Importantly, the Mount Vernon Statement is not geared to any election or candidate or specific piece of legislation.

“We recommit ourselves to the ideas of the American Founding,” the statement begins. “Through the Constitution, the Founders created an enduring framework of limited government based on the rule of law. They sought to secure national independence, provide for economic opportunity, establish true religious liberty and maintain a flourishing society of republican self-government. These principles define us as a country and inspire us as a people.” (Read the rest at www.themountvernonstatement.com).

Visitors to www.themountvernonstatement.com and the Web sites of the various organizations supporting the project are invited to sign the statement online and to use it as a blueprint going forward for activism and policymaking.

It’s meant to go viral as a creed, of sorts, for modern-day conservative believers.

Amen to that.

I’m guessing the title alludes to the critically acclaimed film “Stand and Deliver,” in which Edward James Olmos played a dedicated math teacher who challenges his erstwhile high school dropouts to learn calculus. In the movie, these misunderstood yet courageous young people come of age, metaphorically, as they realize their true potential.

As it happens, according to the Web site phrases.org, the phrase “stand and deliver … was used by 17th century highwaymen (robbers) in the [United Kingdom], when holding up stagecoaches.” It literally means, “Stop and give me your valuables.”

Come to think of it, given the contents of this ghastly report, the title may be apropos after all, because what the IPPF wants to do is hold our children up and steal their innocence, their childhoods and, worst of all, their sexual morality.

First, some context: The IPPF is the international umbrella for 180 Planned Parenthood organizations worldwide. Its political agenda includes population control through contraception and abortion, as well as the broad promotion of “sexual rights.”

The IPPF works closely with the United Nations and other international groups to promote social and political change in support of their views on sexuality.

Those views include seven principles of “sexual rights,” including that “Sexuality is an integral part of the personhood of every human being, for this reason a favorable environment in which everyone may enjoy all sexual rights as part of the process of development must be created” and “Sexuality, and pleasure deriving from it, is a central aspect of being human.”

The IPPF’s new report on sexuality in young people – loosely defined, but including anyone over the age of 10 – expands on these rights to include children.

That’s right. Children.

The report says, “The evolving capacities of the child include his or her physiological ability to reproduce, his or her psychological ability to make informed decisions about counseling and health care, and his or her emotional and social ability to engage in sexual behaviors in accordance with the responsibilities and roles that this entails.”

Among the recommendations the IPPF makes to governments around the globe is mandatory sexual education for children age 10 and older to include “the pleasures of sex.”

Worse, the report specifically calls out organized religions, including the Catholic Church and Islam, for promoting sexual repression.

The report puts it this way: “Young people’s sexuality is still contentious for many religious institutions. … Currently, many religious teachings deny the pleasurable and positive aspects of sex, and limited guidelines for sexual education often focus on abstinence before marriage.”

The IPPF, clearly believing sexual freedom for young people outweighs any concerns about silly things such as … oh, say … thousands of years of religious doctrine, offers up this nugget of advice:

“Each religion or faith must find a way of explaining and providing guidance on issues of sex and sexual relationships among young people, which supports rather than denies their experiences and needs. By highlighting strong values in faiths and religions, and overcoming stigma and stereotypes that religious conventions perpetuate, communities and leaders can help improve young people’s access to sexual and reproductive health information and services, and so improve their health and well-being.”

Huh? If you can get through the jargon, you understand that the IPPF advocates that government leaders usurp the rights of parents to instill their religious beliefs and values about sexual morality in their children in favor of improving “access to sexual and reproductive health information and services” for all young people.

Let’s not forget those services are largely provided by Planned Parenthood. What a coincidence.

To be clear, this report is secular-progressive, free-sex propaganda and anti-religious bigotry disguised as public health white paper, and most of us will read about it and simply think, “This is nuts.”

But it’s not nearly as crazy as the stuff these folks want taught in your child’s fifth-grade classroom. And right now, they have the ear of the U.S. Department of Education.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Perhaps the dark-brown muck oozing its way into the roots of my hair is causing me to doubt my credibility. Perhaps the aluminum foil squares hanging wildly in my face are cutting into my self-confidence.

Or maybe it’s the knowledge that one of the women whose conversation I am overhearing – and whom I dearly wish to admonish – will soon stand over me with a pair of scissors and my hairstyle in her hands.

Whatever the reason, I don’t comment. Instead, I pretend to read a magazine while listening to two women, both mothers of 12-year-old middle school students, lament the difficulties their daughters are having on Facebook.

“I just cannot believe the things these kids write on their walls,” one woman says.

“I know – and in their text messages too,” the other agrees.

Worried about their daughters’ emotional health and about the long-term consequences of rumors, gossip and high-tech teasing, their chatter continues for a solid 15 minutes. It’s a rambling, estrogen-infused diatribe about the indignities of the nasty texts and Facebook comments their daughters endure at the hands of other, meaner middle-schoolers, but also the great parenting strategies they use to make sure their girls do not respond in kind.

“I said, ‘You had better not do that.’”

Masterful. Really.

Oddly, though, at no point in their conversation does either gal question the wisdom or necessity of 12-year-olds participating in social networking sites or of owning and using cell phones to communicate with their 12-year-old posses.

I say “oddly” because this is the first thing that pops into my mind, and the very comment I’d love to blurt out. In fact, what I want to say is, “What hallucinogen are you women taking? Facebook was not created for immature, overemotional, pre-pubescent 12-year-olds.”

Or better, I might say, “Hey, ladies, did either of you read Facebook’s privacy policy that specifically prohibits the participation of children under age 13? Or any newspaper or Web site describing the dangers of children being wired and unsupervised? Because I hate to break it to you, but yours are.”

But again, I don’t say anything because it’s not polite. In fact, commenting on other people’s parenting is considered more than just intrusive or rude; it’s politically incorrect.

The Fort Hood shooting incident taught us the ramifications of political correctness and its impact on our military. For several years, Nidal Hasan made his jihadist political views known to his co-workers and superiors, but since it would be rude to point out the inherent anti-Americanism of his religious and political opinions, the folks who could impede him simply sat there with aluminum foil on their heads.

The result was a “politically correct” tragedy that has changed the lives of more than a dozen families.

Political correctness is wreaking havoc similarly on our nation’s children. The public schools are fraught with bold and bizarre ideas such as “gender education” and graphic sexuality classes that make the former notion of “health” class look like a reading primer from the 1950s.

Curriculum has been hijacked for political purposes, with revisionist history, “climate science” and PC literature at the forefront of the public schools’ outcome-based agenda. Now, the Obama administration is suggesting that children spend even more time in the classroom and less time at home with their parents.

Parents who speak out against the PC establishment that influences their children are labeled bigots or racists or homophobics or prudes, simply because they want to protect their childrens innocence and keep them from indoctrination at the tender age of 11, when, for example, fourth-graders in Massachusetts can be asked to draw pictures of the reproductive sex act.

It’s clear that remaining quiet isn’t serving our children’s interests. We need to worry less about how we’re perceived and more about the generation being raised by people who are politely keeping the truth to themselves.

Now to call and make my next hair appointment.

"Researchers shocked at kids’ online time," says one. "U.S. kids using media almost 8 hours a day," another screams. "New media use by children up by hours per week," another story warns.

Essentially, the news coverage since last week’s unveiling of the updated research on children, teens and the media has focused on the sheer quantity of media consumed by America’s youths, and this is newsworthy, to be sure.

The very idea that children and teens are physically able to absorb more than 53 hours per week of media content — or seven hours and 38 minutes per day — astonished even the researchers, who had thought the previous average of six hours and 21 minutes per day calculated in 2004 represented the maximum amount of time that could be spent.

Even more mind-boggling, thanks to multitasking (using more than one kind of media at a time) children and teens "actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes … worth of media content into those 7½ hours," the KFF study says. A note to the already astonished: The study didn’t include the time youngsters spend texting via cell phones. Add another 1½ hours per day.

As the mother of four, I wonder if the folks who are surprised by this research have children. It strikes me that only the childless would be shocked by the results. The rest of us spend much of our time saying things like, "Turn off the computer and go to bed."

Those who wonder how it’s possible that a child can rack up more time using electronic media than most people spend earning a living are perhaps unaware that nearly 70 percent of American children have television sets in their bedrooms. As well, most youngsters personally own computers, gaming systems and, increasingly, mobile devices that provide full access to the Internet. Most important, for most children, there are no rules about when and how they may use their electronics.

According to the study, "Only about three in ten young people say they have rules about how much time they can spend watching TV (28%) or playing video games (30%), and 36% say the same about using the computer. But when parents do set limits, children spend less time with media: those with any media rules consume nearly 3 hours less media per day (2:52) than those with no rules."

(Rule No. 1: No TV in the bedroom. Duh.)

It’s challenging not only to monitor the amount of time youngsters spend using media, but how they use it as well. According to OnlineFamily.Norton, a monitoring system offered by the Internet security company Symantec, 2009’s top five online search terms for children and teens were YouTube, Google, Facebook, "sex" and "porn."

Clearly, some of those seven hours using media are unsupervised.

Common sense ought to tell us that there will be cultural repercussions for allowing our children to develop what can only be described as a media obsession.

For example, the KFF study reveals that roughly 75 percent of seventh- to 12th-graders have a profile on a social networking site. Meanwhile, Junior Achievement’s seventh annual teen ethics survey found that those social networking sites have become so central to teens’ lifestyles that more than half (58 percent) "[w]ould consider their ability to access them during working hours when weighing a job offer from a potential employer."

Um, kids … Google "time theft" and see what you get.

It’s time for us to get over our shock that what is happening right before our eyes is, in fact, happening right before our eyes. Parents (read: we) must teach Generation M to incorporate media into a balanced, healthy, whole life.

As it is, 53 hours a week is just too much.

But not just sex. Graphic sex. The guest talks candidly to the show’s regular cadre of physicians about exactly how she contracted HIV, and she’s not using any euphemisms.

Call me repressed, but I just don’t want to share this moment with a roomful of strangers. As my teenagers would say, “AWK-ward.”

On the other hand, I’ve never felt awkward talking to my teens about sex. It’s a subject we’ve discussed openly in our home since our children were young. At every age and stage of development, we’ve addressed their curiosity and need for information about human sexuality just as we talk about other issues of health and morality.

It turns out for all our culture’s “sexual liberation,” today’s parents are still too reticent to discuss sexuality with their children. This month’s edition of the journal Pediatrics includes a study that shows when it comes to communicating with children about sex, America’s parenting can be summed up thusly: too little, too late.

“Many adolescents report little or no communication about sexuality with their parents,” the study found. Worse, “Many parents and adolescents do not talk about important sexual topics before adolescents’ sexual debut.”

Past studies have suggested that many parents underestimate their adolescents’ sexual activity, assuming their children are not engaging in sexual behaviors. One such study found 58 percent of teens reported they were sexually active, while only one-third of their mothers believed they were. Perhaps this is why so many parents miss the chance to influence their teens’ choices to become sexually active.

Yet one thing is abundantly clear: Parents who make their moral beliefs about sex known to their children and clearly express their disapproval of adolescent sex have a positive influence on their children’s attitudes and behavior. These conversations also serve to strengthen relationships between parents and adolescents, and closer relationships also are a key to avoiding premature sexual activity.

The new study doesn’t tell us why parents are so squeamish about talking to their children about sex. My guess is that the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s left us with some truly confusing societal norms about human sexuality. On the one hand, we’ve spawned “the hook-up culture,” yet we’re still offended by promiscuity and infidelity. Where sex is concerned, our moral compass seems to spin without ever stopping on true north.

Of course, if parents are too embarrassed to talk to their children about sex – and to put sexual behaviors in the proper moral context – never fear. The media feeds our kids messages about sex thousands of times a day, according to one estimate. Who needs to endure an uncomfortable discussion with an eye-rolling 13-year-old when you can simply turn on the TV and watch commercials for birth control pills and sexual dysfunction remedies punctuating sitcoms about sexual threesomes? Everything you ever wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask is answered every night during the family hour.

Alternatively, as an answer to the dearth of information provided to adolescents by their parents, some would expand programs and policies that circumvent parental involvement. But distributing birth control and abortion counseling without parental consent ultimately does teens a huge disservice by impeding parents from fulfilling their responsibilities to their children.

It’s time for parents to question all our assumptions about what our children know and don’t know about sex, and to quit relying on the media and school-based health classes to educate them.

Teaching kids about sexual health and morality is a parent’s job. There’s nothing awkward about it.

I can see why you’d come to that conclusion after last week, when my comments about you and the show on which you appear, MTV’s “Jersey Shore,” made their way from Us Weekly online to countless entertainment Web sites, including the infamous PerezHilton.com.

But honestly, it’s not personal, Snooki; it’s strictly business.

If you’re reading this and you’re not sure what I’m talking about, congratulations. You’ve managed to avoid MTV’s latest assault on Western civilization. But just in case you find yourself at a cocktail party and you run out of jokes about politicians, here’s the lowdown:

“Jersey Shore” is the MTV reality show featuring eight Italian-American young adults who reside for one month in a summer home on – you guessed it – the Jersey Shore. By day, they’re required to work in a T-shirt shop on the boardwalk; by night, they’re free to roam the clubs, drink, “hook up” and generally pursue a hedonistic lifestyle. Lights, cameras, action.

MTV has been widely criticized for this program, especially by UNICO National and the National Italian American Foundation, for besmirching the image of Italian-Americans. The show’s stars call themselves “Guidos” and “Guidettes” and generally promote every cultural stereotype of their shared ethnicity, from hair gel and “mommas boys” to steroid use and fake tans.

In fact, it’s Snooki’s advocacy of tanning that drew me into the “Jersey Shore” controversy. Appearing on “The Jay Leno Show,” Snooki said her goal in life was to “change the world by installing a tanning bed into everybody’s homes.” Perhaps Snooki hasn’t heard that tanning beds are known to cause cancer.

Us Weekly’s online edition asked the Parents Television Council (PTC) for a response to Snooki’s inane comment. As a member of PTC’s advisory board, I offered the observation that “Jersey Shore” is just one more example of MTV’s exploitation of young adults in an effort to chase ratings, while at the same time promoting dangerous, destructive, immoral and unhealthy behaviors like binge drinking, illegal drug use, promiscuous sex, foul language and now, it appears, excessive tanning.

The headlines read “Snooki blasted by TV watchdog group” but they should have read “MTV continues assault on America’s youths.”

Of course, MTV is not alone. As PTC thoroughly documents, the public airwaves are fraught with content that corrupts the hearts and souls of our youngest generation, most of which is easily accessible despite Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules that supposedly regulate the “family hour.”

Sadly, trashy TV shows garner ratings and young children are in the audience. Worse, most of the parents I talk to don’t know about the programs their kids watch.

Studies have long proved that television content promotes similar behavior in viewers. TV shows obviously are effective in establishing trends and fads that kids enthusiastically follow. The bottom line: Kids adopt the culture they see on TV.

This is why America’s parents need to do a better job of sheltering kids from destructive content on TV. It would be nice if there were fewer shows that corrupted our children’s innocence and taught them about things beyond their years, but we can’t count on the FCC or our local broadcasters to do our job for us. It’s up to us to be the filters through which our children absorb the culture.

I don’t hate Snooki or any of the young adults on “Jersey Shore.” In fact, I feel sorry for them. While they may think they’ve found fame and fortune on the Jersey Shore, the truth is they’re being laughed at and ridiculed for their comical portrayal of a “subculture” of young adults. When their 15 minutes of fame are up and their fake tans fade away, their big break will be remembered as a big joke.

But it’s not personal. It’s strictly business.

All of these images are captioned, “Take time to be a dad today” and refer to the Web site www.fatherhood.gov.

Positive images of fathers engaging with their children are a welcome message in a culture where families struggle to remain intact and mothers generally bear responsibility for childrearing.

Then again, I’m certain that our Founders are gathered in some corner of heaven wringing their hands and wondering how we evolved into a government that teaches its citizens how fulfill our most basic human responsibilities.

What next? Take time to brush your teeth today? Take time to blow your nose today? Take time to visit the potty today?

There’s a reason they call it a “nanny state.” But sure enough, this ad campaign is a major component of the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse (NRFC) funded by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Family Assistance (OFA).

It “supports efforts to assist states and communities to promote and support responsible fatherhood and healthy marriage.”

Maybe I’m a cynic, but I think it’s ironic that a government that quite literally is bankrupting our children by incurring incomprehensible trillions of dollars in public debt purports to be concerned about quality parenthood.

No matter. We have plenty of money for this sort of campaign, because after all, it’s intended to go upstream to solve the root cause of other social problems. We know that single parents are at a measurable economic disadvantage as compared with those who are married, and that children who grow up in two-parent families enjoy countless educational, social and psychological benefits compared wih their single-parent peers.

Since the research clearly proves that America would be better off if more couples married and stayed in healthy marriages, and if more children were born to two married parents, and if more fathers were committed to both their wives and their children, it must be the job of the federal government to make it so.

It may be a worthy goal, but I have my doubts about the efficacy of having what is mostly a national advertising campaign to recommit our country to the worthy institution of marriage as a function of the federal bureaucracy.

A report available at www.acf.hhs.gov offers proof, by way of case studies, that federal dollars can and do save marriages and prepare couples for committed family life. The report showcases only “select” grantees with “promising” results, but hey, it’s close enough for government work.

We may be up to our eyeballs in debt, but at least we’re borrowing against our children’s future so that we can shore up their parents’ relationships.

The problem is, there is other research the government seems to ignore. For example, studies prove that men who are churchgoers are more likely to remain married and to be involved with their children than are unchurched men, and that couples whose relationships include a strong religious component are more likely to establish solid, traditional family homes.

Try as we might to avoid the truth, there’s no getting around the fact that family life that is centered on God is simply more stable and more successful.

Rather than spend our tax dollars on ad campaigns, our federal government might do more to eradicate threats to family well-being such as crippling unemployment, burdensome taxes, benefits for remaining unmarried and the scourge of pornography that rots men and marriages from within.

Not as much fun as an ad campaign, but perhaps more effective in the long term.