I think this is a very dangerous assumption. My mother teaches sixth grade in a middle class school in the suburbs, as idyllic and whitebread as you can imagine. Over 10 years ago, after the mandated lecture on “Drugs Are Bad, Mmmmm’kay?” a worried 12 year old came up to her and whispered, “Mrs. Jones, all those things you just told us about…I could buy any of those in the hallway during the next class break…”
My son started school in another suburban middle-class school, and there was a kid expelled for trading marijuana for a Snickers bar in the lunch room. It was later discovered that he stole the marijuana from his parents at the request of the Snicker’s bar owner. Both kids were in second grade.
Of my current crop of friends, one started smoking marijuana at 11, one at 13 and one at 14. (In a wonderful case of parental what-goes-around-comes-around, the smoked-at-11 dad just had his weed stolen by his 13 and 15 year old children.)
I don’t tell you these things to scare you, but to emphasize that you can’t rely on the presumed unavailability of these things; your kids’ safety lies in convincing them they don’t *want *to do them, not that they can’t do them.
But I agree that, except for alcohol, mainstream Hollywood portrayals of drug use are generally a deterrent, not an endorsement.
Wow. If that is the situation, I agree that the depiction of doing drugs in the media is something parents might worry about.
It will be some years before I have to worry about that, thankfully, but I have never heard of drugs being a problem in Dutch schools, not in non-problematic neighborhoodsanyway. The system of “coffeeshops” stores (located away form schools, but yes, in city centers) where teenagers have to go to if they want to buy pot, seems to work well to keep sellers of pot out of the schoolyards.
Wow, you sound almost exactly like my sister, who also has 6- and 9-year-old daughters. My sister might be a bit more permissive, but she shares your belief about making a big deal out of things. She actually has to limit what my older niece watches more than the younger, simply because the 9YO is more imitative. Britney Spears (and similar artists) videos are off-limits, because she will start aping Britney’s sexually suggestive gyrations.
The 6YO is the more imaginative/creative of the two, and seems to prefer hard rock to pop. She’d rather grab a microphone or toy guitar and rock out (in fact, she knows all the words to an amazing number of songs, including Bohemian Rhapsody — Queen is her favorite so far — and sings them in tune).
Yeah, in a few years, it won’t bother me, but right now it’s just too hard to explain. I was watching that movie March of the Penguins recently, and pointing out the baby penguins to my daughter…“look how cute they are!” The next thing you know some bird comes along and rips one of them apart. Like I did with the humping puppets, I just distracted her when I realized what was about to happen, because I wasn’t sure what to say about it…“well, honey, sometimes babies get eaten.” :eek:
Also, right now I am trying to shield her from bad language, only because she tends to repeat everything she hears, and I really don’t want her dropping the f-bomb at preschool. This is my weak point, though, as I am the worst offender in my household, and almost as bad as South Park.
My best friend, who normally is a pretty sensible person, happened to be away from home and in a hotel with her kids on 9/11. She couldn’t stop watching it, of course, and since they were in a hotel room her 5 year old saw it all, too. She said in retrospect, it probably wasn’t such a good idea to let him see it. Ya THINK?
Heh. All that came as a surprise to my husband when we were new parents. He didn’t grow up around younger kids, and wasn’t expecting it. On a long car trip with our then-barely-two-year-old first daughter, the car overheated, he slammed his hand on the steering wheel and said “Fuck!” We spent the next several minutes with little girl in the back seat saying “Pop said ‘fuck’; pop said ‘fuck’; pop said. . .”
My son likes it, too. I think he’s particularly fascinated by food: where it comes from, how it’s produced, and so forth. He also likes straight-up science programs, especially those that show dramatic phenomena like volcanoes. I have no problem with letting him watch shows like that.
For the most part, he’s bored with stuff we wouldn’t let him watch anyway. He’ll wander off and go do something else if it’s on.
My kids are now 20 and 21. I barred them from any R-rated movies until they were 14 or so. This seemed esiest to me, as it would take care of both graphic sex, or gore. After age 14 we went on a case-by-case basis for a few years.
Back in those days, TV wasn’t such a problem – there was nothing too terrible on regular TV. For the movie channels (when we had them), I just fell back on the PG-13 or below rule. I’s a little dicier nowadays. I wouldn’t let my kids watch South Park if they were elementary school age. After age 14, then yes.
Books I didn’t have any hard-and-fast rule. My daughter doesn’t read for pleasure, much, so she was satisfied to stick to things she found on the weekly trip to the school library. My son likes to read, so I might have had to think about it a bit more if he hadn’t mostly read non-fiction. I can’t think of anything he ever wanted to read that I told him not to. That said, I have to admit that I brought home most of his reading material. When I went to the library or book store, I’d bring him home something. There were books I would have liked to share with him, but felt I couldn’t because of content. Gary Jennings’ Spangle, for example. It’s about a down-on-its-luck circus in the years immediately after the Civl War and I knew he’d love it. But it’s got lots or gore, sex, kinky sex & violence. I finally gave it to him a couple of weeks ago and he did love it, just as I thought. But he agreed that he wouldn’t have wanted to read it in junior high or high school, and would have been wigged out if I’d given it to him then.
My twins will be 4 in a couple of months, so their media consumption is almost all shows created specifically for preschoolers. Dora, Diego, Spongebob, and various PBS cartoons.
I learned a long time ago that I had to be careful about what I watched while they’re around. *Supernanny * fascinates me, but if mine were in the room they’d immediately start to mimic the terrible “before” behavior displayed on the show.
At this point I can’t even watch Roseanne reruns because while the sarcasm is beyond them, the rudeness is obvious and it’s something I’ve tried to teach them about. Doesn’t make sense for Mommy to be laughing at forbidden behaviors.
We watched Star Wars (well, parts of it) last spring and they got their first taste of a truly “bad” character. It was a bittersweet moment for me, beginning to teach them that there IS evil in the world.
My son recently figured out that the BoBo Brothers on Diego are “little bad” and not in the same league as Darth Vader.
In general, most people shield themselves from slaughterhouses so well that they don’t even realize they’re shielding their children from the realities of that subject.
Mrs. Snowblindfrog and I have a 2 year old and a 4 month old. At this point our TV viewing when the tadpoles are around consists of Dora, Diego, Blues Clues or HGTV. HGTV is really the only family friendly channel out there. No matter what time of day, you can rest assured there is nothing bad on there. We’re big fans of CSI and other similarly styled crime dramas but don’t think the little ones need to see all the gore. There’s plenty more time in their future to see blood and guts. I don’t freak out over scantily clad people on TV though. My mother-in-law actually gets irritated about the window displays in Victoria’s Secret, saying that’s it’s soft-core porn! She’s crazy though, so what does she know?
Now when it comes to music we just try to sheild them from hearing curse words if possible. We have slipped up on this before, but not all that often. I personally listen to a lot of death metal, and since you can’t understand the lyrics anyway, it would seem harmless. My 2 year old actually loves the frantic rhythms and hypersonic tempos. She sits in the back of car just bopping side to side.
Ooooh, that’s a good one, too. I do the same, both by use of the DVR and fast forwarding through commercials, and avoiding shows like Dora the Explorer, Spongebob, Blue’s Clues and any other show I know more than two characters from without ever having seen, simply because I’ve been inundated with merchandising from them. I feel like they are more ads for merchandise than shows worth watching. Sesame Street is our exception, because I reserve the right to be arbitrary and capricious.
I mean, Dora’s not the end of the world, and I wouldn’t freak out if she saw a show, but with the limited amount of TV time she gets, I see no real need to add it to her repertoire. And yet, as I type this, there’s a Diego cup lying on my desk, and I’m pretty sure the dolphin in the bathtub came with Diego and a boat - the merchandise has snunk through even without watching the shows. But at least I don’t hear a constant barrage of whining for character related toys (except for ogsdamn Elmo.)
We were just watching* Little House on the Prairie* on live TV while wrapping gifts, and whenever a commercial came on, she asked me to put the “camping show” back on! (it’s the episode where the Ingallses go camping with Nellie’s family) I explained that the nice girls and grownups in the show had to be paid, and to pay them, the producers took money from Colgate, and let Colgate show a short show to try and get us to buy Colgate. I’m sure it flew right over her head, but we’ve made it to almost three without having to have that talk.
Someday, just like her brother, she’ll beg me for some garbagey thing she saw in an ad, and I’ll get it for her and let her be disappointed. It was the best lesson my son ever gave himself in misleading advertising. (For him, it was instant oatmeal with “hatching dinosaur eggs”. He was crushed that the eggs didn’t hatch into animated dancing dinosaurs that leaped out of his bowl. Uh-huh.)
Some things don’t change. My mom tells a story about my older brother, that when he was really small, he wanted a Pillsbury Doughboy. They happened to have a promotion where you could send away for one with boxtops or some such. He was gravely disappointed to get a stuffed Doughboy, and not one that walked & talked like he saw on TV! That was 40 years ago.
Oh yeah, I do the advertising thing too. Yay TiVo!
A lot of my philosophy is that there’s just a whole lot of better things to be doing. So while I don’t have any objection to Dora, we don’t watch it. I don’t hugely object to my kids hearing pop music (as long as I get to screen it, for now), but I want them to hear a lot of different music, so I try to play folk and classical and kids’ songs and oldies and a whole lot of different stuff, which squeezes out the pop music, oh darn. I always think it’s kind of sad when a kid only knows pop music and can’t sing anything else.
And of course any music that IMO denigrates women or anything like that is right out.
My son is 8 and is yet another poor child not allowed to watch Family Guy. Just too much blatent gross-out humor for me to be comfortable letting my kid watch it. He is allowed the Simpsons and Futurama although there’s a couple episodes of each I’d censor.
By in large, it’s the usual things. Glorified drug use (as opposed to Very Special Episodes), Graphic sexuality and any sexuality paired with violence although he knows where babies come from and thinks its gross so I’m not worried by him seeing passionate kissing or whatever. I’m not completely against action-violence but block off gore for gore’s sake. He watched Aliens with me and ‘understood’ that it was a movie but still seemed worried. So we watched the special features and I showed him how they aliens were just glorifed Muppets. He also saw Gremlins and, amusingly, the only part I cut out was the “Santa” speech where Phoebe Cates talks about her father dying. He still believes in Santa
Video games, I keep to an “E” rating with the occassional “T” if I’ve vetted it and the violence isn’t person on person. For instance he has some racing demolition game rated “T” but it’s vehicle ‘violence’ and not people getting mowed down.
He’s a good reader but hasn’t tried to read anything questionable yet.
Our kids are in their mid 30’s. I avoid suggesting reading material that dwells too darkly on the human condition of mortality and the theme of decline with age, because your 30’s are more happily and productively spent with more of a light optimistic feeling that the future will go on and on and on.
My nieces are funny in this regard. The 9YO is the type who, if she hears a curse word, will get all giggly and say, conspiratorially, “He/she said !@#$”, apparently trying to indicate to us that she knows what the word means. However, she strikes me as the type who still doesn’t really understand how and when swearing is “appropriate”, and would probably sound silly if she tried.
The 6YO, OTOH … She can be in the room and somebody on TV will swear and it’s as if she didn’t hear it. Turns out she’s simply not fazed by it, and apparently has a pretty good “vocabulary”, if you will, and knows how to use it. I was visiting one day and my sister was showing her something or other, and whatever it was seriously surprised her … she exclaimed, “What the FUCK?!” Then she immediately clapped both little hands over her little mouth like “Did I say that out loud?”
ITA about squeezing other things out, rather than forbidding them. There’s nothing more fun than grooving along with my kids to music that I love! I hope I’m shaping their taste in a positive way – and that they’ll return the favor in 10 years by culling through the latest releases to find the ones worth listening to and sharing them with ME!
Most of the television my kids watch doesn’t involve commercials. I agree that it’s important to discuss deception in advertising. I resent that grocery stores stock the Dora-Barbie-Spiderman “fruit treat” boxes right at their eye level.
One time I capitulated and bought a can of Dora soup or something. One taste and they were done. Haven’t asked for that one since.
My daughter is sixteen now, so she watches pretty much whatever she wants.
I don’t remember outright *forbidding * much. When she was little, it was easy enough to keep her unaware of the existence of the shows and movies I didn’t want her to see. As she got older, I might occasionally tell her that I was watching something that wasn’t for her, and send her elsewhere to play (which she never made a big deal of), but mostly I just kept the TV on Nickelodeon or Disney anyway, the less for me to worry about. Although I do remember not wanting her to watch Ren and Stimpy.
As she got older, it became all about context and quality. It’s a little hard to quantify, but I didn’t mind letting her watch “questionable” content in a show that I was pretty sure would handle it in at least an interesting manner. *Buffy * is an excellent example. That show has prompted some truly great discussions about sex and love, ethics and morality, and the importance of behaving honorably.
Now that I think about it, the only show I ever actually *forbade * her to watch was Nip/Tuck, a couple of years ago. She didn’t really care, but of course it did pique her curiousity. Recently, we were flipping channels and it was on, and she left it there, glancing at me. I shrugged, so we watched. At the end of it, she turned to me and said “That was disturbing and icky on many levels. I feel dirty now.” I said “Yeah, that’s how I felt any time I ever watched this.” And we had a pretty interesting talk about the intentions of the show, and the nature of art. So that worked out. I’d still prefer she not watch it, though!
Oh, I agree with you. Dearly Beloved is handling (or at least making most of the decisions on) the whole sex issue as he has better boundaries about it in many ways. And I think I am relatively healthy in that area. I confess I had to rethink my thinking when I asked idly where Dutch kids make out, (no cars being available and “parking” being the main locale for making out in my youth) and my Mother in Law, a good catholic middle class Dutch lady, west-brabant born and bred, explained that I would likely at some point be making breakfast for my kids’ girlfriends. Though gentlemanly Dutch boys go to the girl’s house usually in the beginning, it’s not mandatory but is netjes.
Er. Erum. Erahem. When worlds collide, lol.
I don’t watch soap operas, so my kids have missed that.
In general I have to say I find Dutch kids sort of pert. My kids’ friends are well brought up Dutch kids, and when they do what appears to me to be “talking back”, which I find rude, they very clearly have no notion that somebody else might find that rude. So I just roll with it. It isn’t really rude exactly, just sort of pert. But an American child saying that would know they were being, er, mischevious. Pushing the boundary. Dutch kids are entirely innocent of that boundary. And in truth, I am not philosophically opposed to it, I just have to watch my own reactions.
The bluntness thing is hard to get used to, as is the fact that things Americans find private are not private in Holland and vice versa. So as an immigrant one feels sort of bruised now and again.
The thing I am philosphically opposed to and struggle with daily is sourced in the emphasis on independence in children. But the part I struggle with is the assumption that certain behaviors simply are inevitable in adolescence and the coupled-thereto assumption that this behavior begins as early as groep 4 (which is second grade for the 'Mericans amoung us, I have no idea elesewhere: eight or nine years old anyway). Dutch moms assume that kids will depart from the family and attach to their peer group and that the process of so doing will result in a rejection of the family and concomitant rudeness and so on. Since this is inevitable – ideed desirable – the down side must be accepted, seems to be the going idea, and I just Don’t Think So. But I have not worked out exactly how to deal with it and am currently just making it up as I go along. Like everyhtign else, but still.
