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risk, heart-ache, and apparently from most other experiences that might teach them something other than how to be like everyone else. This is the age of damned conformity and every tendency of the child to go off on a tangent, every experience that might present him with problems or experiences outside the limits of the ordinary and "acceptable", is to be avoided in the interest of helping the child to grow up "well adjusted", secure and untroubled. That is to say, anything that tends to encourage him towards being anything but a cog in the nicely adjusted status quo, is to be kept away from him. Its no wonder that the teen agers react against this with their rather extreme brands of non-conformity.

So what has this to do with the subject of TV? Simply this, that it is "obvious" that no child should be allowed to come into the knowledge that his Dad likes to wear dresses and heels like Mommy. It would ruin his father image. (Nobody seems to notice what a lousy lot of father images so many non-TV fathers present). As a result very few parents seriously stop and consider, a) whether a child, male or female, could have the matter pre- sented to him in such a way that he would not be hurt, and b) whether the family at large and the father in particular might not be better off if the child did know. Better off in that there would then be no need for secrecy, of worrying about discovery and its attendent mumbling and stumbling around in embarrassement, trying to explain. This is certain to be more damaging to the child than a simple, honest, straightforward, unguiltridden explanation. Moreover, the sharing of problems, hobbies, inter- ests, activities etc. between parents and children, can prove beneficial to each of them.

It is my feeling that like so many other things in life, fear of a thing is often more damaging than the thing itself would be. The old saying, "Antici- pation is greater than realization" is the positive expression. The negative one might well be that anticipatory fear and worry about something can be

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