Doper parents, what subjects in books/music/media do you shield your kids from? Why?

In My Humble Opinion
1

It will be years before MaastrichtSon will be old enough to handle the remote control. :slight_smile: But this thread, Were you ever one of those children adults were trying to protect? made me wonder. Many Dopers in that thread, raised when mass-media were relatively new, recalled how ineffectively their caregivers tried to shield them from stuff they didn’t really need shielding from.
Having learned from your own past, Doper parents, is there any kind of messages, images or stories you try to shield your kids from nowadays?

Please specify the kids ages, and be as specific as possible. So, no “I shield my kid from gore” but “They won’t be watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer untill they are twelve”. I’m most interested in things you really shield your kids from, so don’t mention the things your kids can watch under supervision.

To get started, here’s a list of more or less shieldworthy subjects:
nudity, strong language, gore, suspense, sex, world news/world programs, religion or lack thereof, animals suffering, violence, news about sexual predators; real dangers like housefires…

2

Having little tiny kids right now who don’t watch TV, I don’t worry about it too much. However, I did have an incident the other day that made me actually attempt to distract my 3-year-old. We were watching that Parker/Stone movie with the marrionettes…what’s it called? Team America or something? Well, in this movie (which I found quite funny, by the way), is a scene where two of the puppets go at it in all kinds of positions. It was as graphic as porn, except that the male puppet didn’t have any…um…equipment, as it were. (Hilarious) It didn’t seem like something I wanted to have to explain to my daughter, so as I said, I distracted her until it was over.

I also tend to turn off nature programs when there’s an animal that’s about to get eaten. Don’t think she’s quite ready for that yet.

I think I will probably continue to play it by ear like that, but generally speaking, I think graphic sex and violence will be out until they are at least in HS.

3

Got two kids - 12 and 5.

I have found that the 12 year old covers his own eyes during any sexual scenes in movies that we watch (asking if it is over). If it is movie with an extended scene, he will leave the room. I tell him to leave if there is a rape scene (I don’t like them either).

Action violence is fine, torture is not along with horror. This is due to nightmares more than anything. He, again, self censors. I had him watch Black Hawk Down with me when he was starting the “military stuff is cool” phase a year or so ago. It helped ground him a bit in reality.

Our 5 year old doesn’t like “mommy daddy” shows, so he leaves the room on his own. Then again, he is happiest watching Food Network and prefers Rachel Ray to Cartoons. Judge me as you will on THAT one!

We expose our kids to most of what we watch. I have also made it clear to my older son and his friends that I can figure out what they have been doing on the computer so they should be careful what they do on our household machines.

In summary:
Sex scenes - older kid self censors.
Violence - OK with me, though I try to limit rape and torture viewing opportunities.
Control - little goes on in our house without our knowledge SO FAR.

4

I have a 6 year old and a 9 year old. Both girls. I’m with Sarahfeena; about the only thing I shield them from is graphic sex and gore, but I’d have to add drug use too (shooting up, snorting, etc.). And I guess we adhere pretty strictly to the ratings on video games we let them play. Mrs. SS and I make it a point to try not to use foul language around them either, though the occassional slip does happen.

I guess I’m of the school of thought that if the parents don’t make a big deal out of something, the kids probably won’t even notice.

This may be kind of a hijack, but my daughters and I were watching some old school cartoons the other day like Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes, stuff like that. I never realized how many cartoon characters smoked back then. Usually minor characters, but still. But to my earlier point: I guess it didn’t seem odd to me when I was a kid, but it sure does now.

  • SS
5

I’ve always let my kids read just about anything they want (they can have those mental images if they’re willing to work for them!), but have shielded them from certain TV shows when they were younger. My youngest, almost 8, thinks everything her 16-year-old sister does is golden. So she would love to watch Family Guy. However, I won’t allow it. There’s just too much that’s wrong in that show. I don’t let her watch South Park, either, but since no one she reveres watches it, she doesn’t ask about it too much. I can’t think of anything I won’t let the 16-year-old watch. She’s pretty good at the self-governing thing. But when she was young, I wouldn’t let her watch Beavis and Butthead or The Simpsons.

My in-laws rag on me about this kind of censorship. “We always let our kids watch everything on TV” is their war-cry. Yeah, well, there used to be a whole lot less of “everything” on TV!

Nudity doesn’t bother me. People get naked sometimes. Sexual situations, when age-appropriate, don’t bother me. People have sex, at some point, kids learn about this. I remember my middle daughter coming downstairs one night after watching an episode of Degrassi in her room, and asking what a “woody” was (she was about 12). We explained it to her. Nature stuff, as mentioned by Sarahfeena doesn’t bother me, either (of course, my kids aren’t as young as hers). The youngest is the proud owner of both a kitty who likes to hunt, and a tarantula that we regularly feed baby crickets to. She’s well-familiar with the circle of life.

The youngest sometimes asks me when she’ll be old enough to watch Family Guy. My stock answer is “when you’re 13”. That doesn’t necessarily mean she won’t be allowed to watch such things before then. But it largely depends on the kid. My oldest is, and always was, very easily influenced. She didn’t have very strong inner values. So I tried as hard as I could to protect her from stuff like that for as long as I could. My middle daughter is much more level-headed, and much more reliable when it comes to being self-directed. She’s not easily influenced by peer pressure. So I leave it up to her. We’ll see how it goes with the youngest.

Oh, and there are certain things that I don’t allow just because I don’t want to be exposed to them. There’s some show on TV called Mr. Meaty that just makes me want to puke just to look at it. The youngest is definitely not allowed to watch that. And America’s Funniest Home Videos, because, as I explained to my kids, some things are just funny, some things are funny and mean, and some things are just mean. Mostly, AFHV is just mean. I don’t want to support that.

6

One odd thing I noted is that you can’t really predict what will or will not bother a particular kid. For example, my kids were really upset by Mars Attacks. As best I can figure it out, it really bothered them that the aliens were saying “We mean you no harm” and then going ahead and harming everybody they met.

Another thing that seemed to bother them on a case-by-case basis was “meanness.” They might not be at all phased by a loving sex scene, but they’d be very upset by a scene where someone was just mean to someone, especially out of the blue. Sorry I’m not coming up with a good example.

My eldest was in kindergarten when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred. I remember other parents saying their kids were bothered by it. I don’t think my daughter ever knew about it at the time, as we never watched the news around her and she didn’t read the paper.

My youngest is now 16, and she pretty much refuses to watch R-rated movies. Just says they tend to stick with her in ways she finds unpleasant. Kinda limits our family’s choice of videos. Of course she was our family’s biggest fan of the Sopranos. When we were working our way through the taped seasons she’d say “Who wants to watch some entirely inappropriate TV?”

7

Don’t bet on it. My friends’ three-year-old can operate my computer, at least in the sense of pointing and clicking on a kids’ website.

I wonder about this, too. It’s not “three network television stations and the local newspaper” anymore. Given enough determination, you can find anything these days. But I also remember being a kid. Before puberty, sex was either uninteresting to me, incomprehensible, or occasionally even repellent. What was comprehensible was violence.

I think that, if I had kids, I’d be very cautious about portrayals of meanness and unkindness, as others have mentioned.

8

Here’s another one - interpersonal relations we consider undesireable. Say, sitcoms where the kids are extremely disrespectful of their parents, or the parents are complete idiots, or kids are disrespectful of other peoples’ feelings or property.

I’m not saying that some comedy cannot be derived from such situations, but in much of what passes for comedy, the sole humor appears to be the kids being shits.

Not sure exactly where it falls, but I remember my kids not being comfortable with Married with Children.

9

My kids are eleven and sixteen (boy and girl respectively, if it matters). They have always been allowed to read whatever they want, or listen to any music they choose. However, I’ve shielded them from some movies and TV shows, and monitor their internet use. I haven’t really thought about why only visual media until just now, but I guess it’s because music and books require the child to use their own imagination, whereas a movie could show a kid something so horrible they could never have imagined it, and vividly, too.

Movies don’t pose much of a problem. The “torture porn” such as Saw or Hostel is what I’d keep from them; heck, I protect myself from it. However, I recently allowed the boy to watch Nightmare on Elm Street. I watched it with him and was prepared to turn it off if it got too intense, but he had no problem with it.

The TV show they are forbidden to watch is South Park. I watch it myself and (despite Mr. Slave’s moving speech) I just balk at the thought of them seeing something like the Paris Hilton episode. I also despise Family Guy, though it’s a little late to ban it now that they’ve seen them all.

So I guess my problems are with realistic violence and …well, not sex, but sex treated in a cavalier, joking, or dirty manner. Family Guy is often stupid and just has a mean, ugly edge to it. Of course, the kids think it’s a laff riot.

10

Another vote for “it depends on the kid”. But it also depends on you - on what your hot button issues or your “I don’t want to explain this yet” issues are. Even if your kid might be ready, if you’re not ready, then you (the unit of you and kid; it’d be nice if English had a second person plural) aren’t ready.

My bugaboo is realistic violence. The kind of stuff of *CSI *or Law and Order; things that can and do happen to real people. Ridiculously over the top cartoonish violence in, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, doesn’t bother me, because it’s easy to explain away as “Hollywood special effects, that doesn’t *really *happen, you know.”

My son (15 next month) early on was fascinated with special effects and moviemaking as an art and science. So, since I happened to love Buffy, it was a pretty easy decision to let him watch it with me when he was about 7. He wasn’t allowed to watch it alone, I had to be there, and it was always recorded (pre-DVR days), so that I could Pause and Discuss as needed. Mostly he wanted to know things like how they timed the blood packs to go off at the right time, and why the fighting Buffy (stunt double) looked nothing like the talking Buffy - movie making stuff. That let me know that he was okay, he wasn’t bothered by anything in the story arc, and he had a firm grasp that this was all very skilled make believe. I did get uneasy in the sixth season when lots of violent, although consensual sex and then a realistic attempted rape was perpetrated by one of the main characters, and I think I did edit out a few scenes there - but again, it was because it turned from cartoonish violence to something too unsettlingly real for my taste.

And be prepared to get it wrong sometimes, and deal with the appropriate apologies and talks afterward. I took him to see A.I. in the theater. I knew it was PG-13, but because he was fine with Buffy, I figured he’d be fine with this. I expected he’d be upset with the abandon-the-kid-in-the-woods scene, but he took that in stride. What really upset him was the Flesh Fair - robots being torn apart and melted with acid to the howls of a depraved crowd. The robots weren’t even particularly humanoid, but for some reason that really got to him. He started crying a bit, and I asked him if we should leave, and he said no, but tell him when that part was over, and he hid under his jacket for the rest of the scene. We had a few talks later about bullies and people laughing at the helpless, and that helped work out some issues he had. Am I sorry he saw it? No, not really, because it was the impetus he needed to talk about some things that were bothering him. But I’m really glad I was paying attention and followed up on it.

He asked for the movie on DVD when it came out, by the way. He still watches it often, but still fast-forwards through that scene.
In theory, I agree with Dinsdale’s comments about meanness and disrespectful relationships, especially kids. However in reality, it hasn’t come up because neither my husband nor I are into that sort of television, and the kids haven’t asked for it. Mostly, if we’re not watching with them, my daughter’s limited to Baby Einstein and Sesame Street, and my son watches a whole lot of Unwrapped and How’s it Made and World War II documentaries. Which, I guess, is realistic violence, isn’t it? But I feel like he’s old enough to make his own decisions, and he’s got a very good handle on what he can…uh…handle.

His books and video games are unlimited; books have always been his choice, and video games were kept under M until 13 or so, and now I don’t really care what he plays, but he’s required to pause it and shoo the little one out of the room if she wanders in while he’s playing. That was actually his ruling, not mine, but I totally agree with it.

11

We have a 5 year old and a one year old. Our one standing censorship rule in the house is no Family Guy. I haven’t seen much of it, but it’s just not nice. On the other hand, we all sit down to watch the Simpsons every night at 7:00. There’s lots of inappropriateness there, but it’s my kind of inappropriateness, so it’s all OK. I do discourage the watching of nature shows in which Bad Things happen to animals, especially if the bad things are done by humans. We don’t have cable, so there aren’t all that many TV options.

As for movies, we took #1 kid to see Transformers and The Simpsons movie in the theater this summer; both were rated PG13. In general, I’m OK with anything PG, but PG-13 or R movies are decided on a case by case basis, although most won’t appeal to him anyway.

I don’t know what I’ll do when he figures out how to surf the net!

12

Well, the first step in the process is to take the apostrophe and “s” off the first word, and transplant it onto the second word. . . :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously, though, our youngest is entranced by those shows, too. I think it’s all that automation.

13

My kids are 8 and 5. I try to shield them from news reports about bad things that happen to children. Eldest really went through the wringer about the juxtaposition of a couple of news stories last year involving deaths of children. He was afraid to go to school, afraid to go play with his friends at their houses – he couldn’t figure out how those things could happen and why it couldn’t be avoided. That last was the problem, really. But truly, the whole nation of Holland was in shock and there was a good deal of public mourning (as you may recall) and in some ways that helped him to deal with it. At least he had the comfort of knowing that he was not the only one.

But honestly, there was no shielding him from that. It was wall to wall coverage, you couldn’t even turn on the radio without it being discussed. So we talked about it a great deal. Still I did try to avoid news coverage of incomprehensible bad things happening to children for a time while the Holloway/Jesse stories were current.

On both sex and disrespectful relationships I have to say, well, it’s Dutch TV, I would have to turn it off entirely, lol. You can’t fight the dominant culture. But they are very good about having it off the air in kiddie prime time, I have to give them that.

ETA, then changed my mind. I’m indecisive today.

14

We don’t have a TV, so that solves a lot of problems. My daughter has been asking to read my “adult” Pratchett books lately and I’ve let her do so, even though there’s a bit of rough language and so forth. They only watch movies at school or with us and the school has us sign off on anything above a G rating. My kids are 10 and 8 and we took them to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which is rated PG-13, and they were fine with it. They’d both read the book, though.

We listen to the radio news, sometimes, and I’ve occasionally turned off something that was particularly horrific.

Generally they regulate themselves in regard to what they are ready for and we don’t have too many books around with strong violence or sexual content that would really interest them yet.

I read freely when I was a kid and went through a phase of eagerly gobbling up gory horror and really trashy stuff. I just eventually grew out of it and lost interest.

15

My kids are 7 and 4.

I don’t let them watch much TV at all. A lot of that is that there are plenty of things I’d rather have them doing. The 4-yo would be a screen addict if I let her, and she also gets grumpy if she watches more than about half an hour at a time. So for the moment, they aren’t watching much TV, and when they do, it’s from TiVo or a video. We get movies from the library or I tape things they’ll like. They watched March of the penguins a few days ago and loved it; I was much more affected by the loss of baby penguins than they were. But everything they watch is pretty dang clean.

We don’t watch a lot of violent or sexual TV ourselves; Firefly is about the edgiest thing we’ve ever watched, and we skip the more graphic sex, and I would definitely restrict that to 14+. Something like Stargate I would allow younger. LOTR movies are scary. I haven’t even let the 7yo watch the Narnia movie yet, because the war scenes are so scary! It really depends on the kid, but so far mine don’t like really scary stuff. And something like South Park or Family Guy is right out; I’m not sure I’m old enough for those shows.

I’m a lot more liberal with books. I would let them read most things that they can read, but I’m going to be screening for age-appropriate content for several years yet. No V. C. Andrews for 12-yos around here, please.

Part of my thing about movies is that I really want my kids to read and love the books first. And I’m kind of ambivalent about movies from books; once you see the film, your personal images of what Frodo or Lucy look like are bulldozed by the movie images, and you never really get them back. So while I like the Narnia movie, I also don’t want to screw up my kids’ own images too soon, and I prefer to put it off for a while. I do the same thing with fairy tales; I don’t want my kids seeing Sleeping Beauty before they read and love the real story on its own.

I’m perfectly happy for my kids to see most accurate portrayals of religion. I like to take the older one to visit churches, and we talk about different belief systems.

We also talk about “real things like house fires” but I wouldn’t let them watch, say, The towering inferno until they’re 11 or so. That movie scared me to death when I was a kid, and I wasn’t even little.

I know that they’ll see and read things I don’t like. But I’m not sure I want to help them to do it.

I also don’t allow Barbies or Bratz, or the slutwear that passes for clothing in many stores. I’m not wild about commercialized sexuality pretending to be girl empowerment.

16

:smack: I guess that makes sense, it’s the answer, not the question. D’oh!

Ooh, yeah, I’m with you there. My best friend let her little girls watch the footage from the World Trade Center thing when it was on the news those first few days. Footage of planes crashing and even people jumping out of burning buildings. Not cool, I thought.

Since our main source of news is The Daily Show, it’s not really an issue with us. Once in a while, the boy would come home from school traumatized by the news of a school shooting or the similar, and we’d use the sad opportunity for a lesson in statistics and mass media exposure.

17

I never stopped my son from anything . What he encountered at home would be available for discussion unless we suppressed it. Then it would be out of our hands.Of course I did not sit around watching porno.
With all the talk shows bitching about video games, mt wife kept bitching about me talking to him about them. Finally I broached the subject. He looked at me kind of disappointed and said"they are just pixels on a TV screen".

18

Excellent point. I think it’s practically impossible to overemphasize to kids that they can ask you about anything. Whatever you may shield them from at home, they’re going to encounter stuff sooner or later that they don’t know how to interpret. I remember my oldest daughter, probably 11 YO or thereabouts, coming to me after school one day. “Mom, can I ask you a question?” “Sure, honey, you can ask me anything at all” “well, I heard that Marilyn Manson had two of his ribs removed so he’d be able. . .so he’d be able. . to. . .bend over far enough to. . .ummm, reach his own penis with his mouth; is that true?” :eek: I said “Well, he’s a pretty strange character all right, which is probably why these rumors tend to start about him instead of someone people think of as more ‘normal’, but no, I don’t think that’s true. And even if he did have two ribs removed, I don’t think it would allow him enough flexibility for that”.

I never felt like I could talk to my mom about anything. I’ve worked hard to change that with my kids.

19

I understand the shielding from foul language, as kids are known to easily adopt such language.
But could you or any other parent explain why you wouldn’t want to see your kid a scene where someone is using drugs? Most of those scenes make drug use look distinctly unattractive and unglamorous, and anyway it is veryunlikely that a middle class kid who is not living in a dangerous neighborhood will run into some “pusher” on the schoolyard asking them if they’d like to shoot or snort up. Pot, or glue, of course, are a different matter.

20

Yes, that is a major cultural difference, isn’t it? USA and Dutch culture can be regarded in many ways as social experiments where just a few variables are different, with at first sight very different outcomes.
It won’t come as a surprise to you, that being Dutch I don’t see much harm in showing kids nudity, or sex if it is just sex.
I wonder though, if the Dutch habit of showing people (especially in soap opera’s) interact, impacts our kids in anyway. Having seen a lot of American shows, I feel that Dutch soap opera social manners are not just disrespectful, as you rightly mention, but incredible rude, crude and just blunt. Not mean, just …crude. It is an exaggarated form (exaggeration is the Dutch crude way of adding “drama”) of the everyday Dutch bluntness, but many soap-opera’s take it to unpleasant levels.