PSA History: It's 10 P.m. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

The simple message meant to get parents thinking before the 10 O’Clock News

“Do you know where your children are?” is not an optimistic slogan. It’s a warning.

There’s a certain degree of dread hiding behind the simple, evocative message—not to suggest the worst is actually happening, but that it’s out there.

The actual history behind the phrase is hazy. The earliest reference I can find related to its use is January 1967, when a Baltimore newspaper referenced a local station using the phrase in reference to the 11 p.m. hour. Another early claimant to the phrase is Buffalo’s WKBW-TV, whose iconic anchor Irv Weinstein was long associated with using the phrase.

But perhaps the most common association with the local TV meme is via WNEW, which more than any other station, made it their own.

According to a 1985 New York Daily News article, the slogan came into use out of concern for the city’s minority communities, according to Charlotte Morris, who served as the network’s public affairs director. Morris dated the slogan to around 1968, as a part of the station’s “Focus” public affairs segments, when a concerned citizen in Brooklyn, Mildred Coleman, expressed concerns about children who were frequently out after hours.

“Mrs. Coleman told me that there were little children running around at night getting into mischief,” Morris told the Daily News. “She said it was the fault of the parents, and she asked to do a Focus spot urging parents to keep track of their kids.”

The slogan came out of that basic idea, but there is some general cultural context that should be brought into play here. During the summer of 1967, a series of riots took place in major cities, the product of major tensions around civil rights, unemployment, and police brutality that simmered during the era. The simmering came to a boil during that summer, which became known as the “long, hot summer of 1967.” Urban locales—such as Detroit, and especially nearby Newark, New Jersey, a city within shouting distance of WNEW—faced widespread riots.

And those riots only picked up steam in 1968, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stoked social unrest in many major cities throughout the U.S. New York was one of many cities that dealt with the impact of MLK’s death that year.

Morris created a spot for Focus that featured mothers of different ethnic groups—Hispanic, white, and black—that used the “do you know where your children are” part of the iconic message. Here’s how she explained the original spot to the Daily News:

The first was a Puerto Rican mother who said she lived in Brooklyn, had five children, gave their ages, said she always knew where they were and asked: ‘Do you know where your children are tonight?’ The cameras panned next to each of the other two women, who said basically the same thing. The segment was an instant hit, and we got tons of mail.

So where did the actual phrase come from—and why did it get associated with 10 p.m. specifically? The credit for that, according to Mental Floss, is a result of some canny branding on the part of both the station manger, Mel Epstein, and its lead anchor, Tom Gregory, who came to use the phrase at the top of the station’s ‌Faces and Places in the News. Eventually, the phrase merged into the station’s own branding—as WNEW, known today as WNYW, came to call its newscast The 10 O’Clock News.

We can only assume WNYW came up with it, but they came to own it.

The strange thing about the slogan is that it gained a cult following—not just as a somewhat stern warning, but as a part of popular culture. By the late 1970s, Gregory’s slogan had been handed off to an array of popular celebrities. Hundreds, big and small. (In the clip above, Paul Stanley of Kiss is clearly the most effective at this.)

And considering the market was New York City, cultural capital of the United States some of the celebrities were surprisingly hip. Andy Warhol! Grace Jones! And perhaps the best signifier that the slogan had turned from mere warning to popular meme? The 1985 Daily News piece stated that Channel 5 had just held a party at then-relevant Studio 54 that intended to bring together as many of those celebrities as possible.

(Michael Jackson even wrote a song around the slogan which went unreleased until after his death, though the song seems awkward to even bring up now, given recent revelations about the pop star.)

And WNYW wasn’t alone—newscasts in cities around the country used the slogan. Beyond the cities I’ve already mentioned, I’ve found evidence the slogan (or variants of it, given the different starts to newscast times) made it to Detroit, to Des Moines, to Miami, to Albuquerque.

The phrase is perhaps less prominent today than it once was, and not because parents know where their children are. But given the right time and the right context, it still packs a punch.