Do you follow ratings (Movies, TV, Games)?

In My Humble Opinion
1

It’s about things that belong in Cafe Society, but it IS a poll and the core of the question is really about parenting, so I’ll try it here. If I’ve guessed wrong, I’m sorry.

Do you let your children who are not yet 13 see movies with a PG-13 rating that you have not seen first? Do you let your pre-teen children play games rated T for Teen?

I ask because I do try and follow the guidelines. My son, who is 10, tells me he is the ONLY one of his friends who hasn’t seen/doesn’t watch/hasn’t played any number of these things. I am the one who ultimately decides, but I do consider the rating information.

If you do let your younger children watch movies or play games rated for older children do you think it’s because your own child(ren) particularly mature, or do you think the ratings systems are skewed high (perhaps as a protection for the people who make the ratings)?

Oh, and not worthy of it’s own thread - do you children have bed times? 'Cause I’ve been told no one else in his class has one of those. I’m an ogre.

2

No kids, but I was a kid once, and me and every kid I knew told our parents the same thing.

3

The age limits in the ratings system are very arbitrary, and the system might be based more on Christian morality than anything else (watch This Film Is Not Yet Rated.)

Your best bet is to judge your child’s capacity for understanding the issues in the material. Worry more about the content rather than if a random tit will pop up at one point.

If you think your child will become more violent after watching violent movies, then keep him away from them until he is ready. Same goes for the sex stuff. If you think your ten year old will become a deviant after seeing nudity, then keep him away from that until he is more mature.

IMDB has a more accurate description of objectable scenes in movies, I would suggest using them. Look for parents guide toward the bottom of the site. Here is a page for PG-13 rated Juno.

4

I did, but apparently I was the only parent in the neighborhood who did. I even had one parent sneer at me “You KNOW he’s watching that same movie at my house!”.

5

As a non-parent my only interest in the rating system is: is this horror movie PG-13 or R? because most PG-13 horror movies are rather lame.

My parent didn’t forbid us from watching much of anything. I saw Blue Lagoon at the drive-in after Bambi, and according to Wiki Bambi was in theaters again in 1982, so I was 5; they probably thought I’d fall asleep but I found the non-sex parts facinating. I didn’t remember there was sex in it until I saw it again years later. By the time I was 10 I was watching R-rated movies with Mom & Dad fairly often. The first one with memorable sex scenes Reckless which I saw probably 3 years after it was released since we didn’t get a VCR until around then.

OTOH, until I was about 12 or 13 my bedtime was 9:30PM (except the night Young Riders was on. They changed to a later time and I begged to be able to stay up to see it) and it was 10PM until I started high school. After that I could go to bed whenever I wanted to, though I’d be nagged for staying up past 11PM.

6

I was going to come in and say exactly that… Horror movies are the only instance where I’ll pay attention to the rating.

7

I don’t follow ratings at all. That is because movie ratings seem to have very little relevance to the things that I wish to protect my five-year-old son from seeing. (Games are not an issue as yet.)

I don’t give a hoot if he hears 4-letter words. He hears them enough in real life. He understands that there are some words which are grown-up words, and best reserved for “special occasions.”

I don’t care if he sees naked people.

I don’t care if he sees sexuality, especially if non-explicit and presented in an appropriate context.

I do care if he sees certain types of violence. But the ratings aren’t nuanced enough to guide me in that.

I do care if he’s exposed to certain complex types of situations, largely because he’s still to young to understand them. He’s still very much in the good guys vs. bad guys mode, and it’s kind of hard to deal with movies where there are bad guys and badder bad guys, or good guys who are sorta bad or bad guys who do good things, etc. etc. etc. The result is that he often gets upset and confused. Of course he has to be exposed to these concepts, and he is, but I try to limit it to situations where he CAN understand it if we discuss it.*

I do care if he sees “scary stuff,” but what is scary to him (and me!) doesn’t sem to be reflected in the ratings.

AND a lot of movies with higher ratings are so sanitized when shown on TV that they’re okay for him to watch.

Ultimately, the ratings offer me very little in the way of useful guidance

For example, Aladdin contains some absolutely terrifying scenes. As do a lot of the Disney animated movies!! And they’re rated G!

Another example is the movie I, Robot. It’s rated PG-13, but it’s one of his favorite movies. (TV version, by the way.) I find certain scenes beyond scary, like the one with the demolition robot. The Sprout isn’t bothered by it at all.

Saving Silverman is a movie I love, and it’s a PG-13. And on TV, it’s cleaned up a lot. BUT I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s just too young to get the irony. (And I know a lot of people didn’t like it, and didn’t see it as ironic. He’s also too young to say “this movie is crap!”)

  • An example of one of these complex situations that occurred in the season finale of Monk follows.
    We like to watch Monk together. Naturally, he was upset and confused by seeing Monk, a good guy, doing bad things, like beating up the 6-fingered man and (apparently) shooting him. But when we talked about it (and he discovered that Monk didn’t actually shoot the guy), he understood it. He can understand the concept of good people driven to do bad things, and since he “knows” Mr. Monk, and knows he’s a good person, it wasn’t too difficult. But if he didn’t already know the character, it would have been a lot more confusing and upsetting for him.
8

No, I don’t.

However, when I’m watching a movie with him I make sure to put the movie in context.

As in: “You know son it’s not cool to spy in on the girls locker room. This is only funny because this is a movie.”
To which he’ll usually respond with: “Well, duh?!” :dubious:

Fine, excuse me Mr. enlightened.