The clueless take kids to `South Park’

It’s fair to say that modern-day parenting is one of the most difficult jobs a person could undertake. Ask anyone who’s going through it.

The biggest problem is that no matter how hard you try to get it right these days, no matter how diligent and determined you are about your immense responsibility, there’s a big bad world out there that does everything in its power to consistently undermine your best efforts.

At times, our popular culture seems like nothing more than a vast machine geared to the ceaseless production of the violent, the vulgar, the tawdry, the lascivious, the uncivil and the insipid. The best we parents can do is to confront each day with our fingers crossed, our eyes wide open, and our senses on high alert.

Yet there are times when you hear about parents who appear to be so out of touch, so utterly ignorant of the cultural influences that color their children’s lives, that you have no choice but to think they deserve all the anxiety they get.

USA Today provided a good example of this haplessness in a story about parents’ reaction to the hit summer movie “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.” In theaters across the country, the animated movie has parents reeling in shock, squirming in their seats, absolutely repulsed by what they are seeing and hearing up on the screen. And sitting beside them in their red-faced discomfort are the youngsters they brought along for what was supposed to be a fun night out for the family.

“I ought to have my head examined,” exclaimed a stunned Los Angeles mother who, despite the R rating, chose to believe she was taking her 13-year-old son to a harmless kiddie cartoon.

What she got instead, of course, was a cast of crudely drawn third-graders who managed to pack into 88 minutes more than 130 uses of the f-word, a few bare breasts, a bed scene involving a sex toy, and dialogue peppered with sexual explicitness and offensive social commentary.

“It just kept getting raunchier and raunchier,” protested a mother who wound up fleeing the theater with her 9- and 10-year-old kids in tow.

Which was precisely the point of it all, as this flustered, woefully out-of-the-loop mom should have known from the outset.

In fairness to the film, which is a spinoff of the popular TV show, the creators never tried to sell it as anything but a bizarre little gross-out comedy for mature audiences. Like the controversial TV cartoon that debuted two years ago, the movie was never intended for kids, even if its potty jokes and giggling vulgarity created an obvious and anticipated attraction among the juvenile set. And everything about the movie — including its underlying plot as a satire on censorship itself — was thoroughly hashed out in countless newspaper, magazine and TV stories that surrounded the movie’s opening.

So any parent who gave in to their kid’s pleas to see the movie — and then blithely dismissed its R rating in the process — was simply not paying enough attention. If they were shocked at the theaters, all the better — they should consider themselves lucky for such a relatively harmless wake-up call.

The blue streak of f-words notwithstanding, a silly cartoon like “South Park” isn’t sufficient to corrupt a child and lead him astray. Neither are all the other gross-out juvenile comedies that continue to translate low humor into high profits.

The ignorance exhibited by so many parents does, however, beg a much bigger, more important question: If they are so in the dark about a popular movie showing at the theater downtown, do they have even a clue to the real-life depravity available on the Internet every night in their kids’ rooms upstairs?