My oldest just turned 6. Since he is my oldest, I obviously don’t have any experience making these type of parenting decisions. I just thought I would throw this out to all of you responsible parents so I could get some honest advice.
Here are two of his favorite films right now:
Lord of the Rings. I started telling him the stories a few months ago, and I recently bought the three disc set. He watched the entire first film, telling me all along that he wasn’t scared. He hasn’t seemed to be affected by any of the “scary” Orcs or anything, but how do I know for sure?
DodgeBall. Now I do edit what he sees in this one. None of the sexual content scenes, and I don’t let him see Patches get crushed by the casino sign. He mostly likes the dodgeball action. He has picked up on some of the lingo though. His favorite new saying is “Joanie loves Chachi”.
Is he showing any ill effects? Having bad dreams? Being scared for no reason?
Some kids can deal with this kind of stuff at an earlier age, that’s all. Is he fairly mature, I mean does he realize the difference between movies and reality?
I haven’t seen any ill effects at this point. He is mature for his age, I think, and definitely understands that all of the scenes he is watching are fiction. We made a point to draw the line between fantasy and reality at a very early age, and I guess that has helped. We started telling him at age two that the characters on Sesame Street weren’t real. Does that make me a jerk?
I’d let my kids watch the LOTR movies, if they wanted to (mine are 5 and 7), but they are totally media-innocent compared to most of their classmates and tend to have a lower scary-stuff threshold, which is fine by me.
I do think, though, that the orcs are not the scary thing about those movies–it’s much more traumatizing when human characters we care about start going through a lot of anguish, which except for the “death” of Gandalf, mostly happens in the later movies.
I’d be much more leery of vulgarity and crass sexual stuff, because they seem to pick up on that more quickly. Just me though.
I wouldn’t call you a jerk, rather, far-seeing. If the kid is truly mature for his age then what is gained by talking down to him? He’ll appreciate the honesty all his life.
It’s not the age–it’s the maturity level of the kids.
I took my then-nine-year-old son and a friend to see Lord of the Rings in a theater. My son was enjoying it, but his friend absolutely freaked out over the orcs. I held him in my lap and offered to warn him when scary stuff was coming up so he could cover his eyes, but he was completely terrified, and we had to leave the theater.
Two kids – same age – different reactions.
My daughter would have been able to handle that when she was four. I don’t think I would have taken my son any earlier than eight.
I would call it a sign of good parenting that you told your 2-yo that the Sesame Street characters aren’t real. I think it’s important for kids to understand that TV isn’t real.
All I can say is that I would not let my kid, currently 4.5, watch LOTR for several years. She would be completely freaked out by the scary stuff. Then, I once had a 6-yo cheerfully tell me that his favorite movie was Terminator (but he was showing off). Kids can handle different things. But to be honest, I wouldn’t show my kid movies aimed at older people even if I thought she could handle it, because I’m a very conservative person when it comes to TV and movies. I’m a book person.
Also, I don’t know if you want to think (in general) about reading the books before seeing the movies. My own household rule is that we have to have read the book before seeing the movie. So they haven’t seen Peter Pan yet, for example, because we haven’t read it yet. Partly, this is because the visual medium is so powerful that it tends to override the mental image you get from the book. If you enjoyed imagining Middle-Earth as a teen or adult, remember that your kid who sees the movie first will (almost guaranteed) always see Frodo as Elijah Wood; he’ll never have his own images for those books. I know this is a quirk of mine–not everyone cares about that, and probably you don’t; I just thought I’d throw it out there.
Thanks everyone for the advice so far, and especially for the encouragement! Dangermom** I understand what you are saying about reading the books first. He can’t read the books himself yet, but I have been telling him the stories nightly for about 5 months. We are well past the scenes contained in the first movie, so it didn’t bother me as much that he wanted to see the movie version.
Perhaps I am just a paranoid parent who doesn’t want to “screw up” his kids?
As others have said, it depends entirely on the maturity level of your child.
LilMiss is now 11. I have never censored what she watches, but if it’s something I know is questionable we talk about it. She has seen the Kill Bill movies and has not had any ill effects; however, just seeing the commercial for Others (IIRC) left her with screaming nightmares this past Monday. Suffice it to say, that’s a movie that will not be seen in this house. From seeing other movies we know what movies she can’t handle. Blood and gore action? No problem. Horror and psychological terror movies? No way.
It does make it difficult for sleepovers and such, I have to check with parents about allowable movie ratings beforehand, which is not a big deal from my perspective. It’s entirely within the parents’ rights to say “Missy can’t watch anything over PG”. But, when you have five girls who REALLY want to watch Mean Girls, and one can’t due to enforced G only movies, it become messy.
I give you credit for explaining fiction from reality to him. Many parents don’t want to burst bubbles so soon (“Why yes, Johnny, there really IS a 6’ dinosaur that plays with kids!”), which is sad, IMO.
My father took part in research on what kids found scary. They find different things scary at different ages, and I learnt from that that we generally don’t have a clue what they find scary for what reason.
Example. Children up to 6 found the Barbapapa, Barbamama etc. series by far the scariest show out of all sorts of shows including Westerns and so on. Kids of that age are deeply upset by the constant change in appearance of the characters. The unpredictability is what’s scary here. They’re trying to get a fix on reality by learning to predict things, and they can’t do it.
But lots of other things they don’t find scary. Up to the age of 6, children are ego-centric to a pretty extreme sense. It resembles a kind of autism. They are not really aware that other people have a mind of their own, their own feelings, fears and so on. So they don’t generally suffer along with others. This also explains their capability for cruelty to other children. They just don’t emphatise very well, they have to be taught this in a simplistic way - doing x is bad and leads to punishment, doing y is good and leads to reward. This means that if characters in a movie are in emotional distress, fear, pain and so on, they won’t really feel with them and it won’t upset them. There’s lots of stuff they don’t get. If anything will scare them, it’ll be stuff that frightens them more primitively and reminds them of stuff that scare them in real life.
Up from the age of 6 (till about 9), children start learning to understand that other people have their own thoughts and feelings, and they start being able to emphathise. The example given of the kid that was scared of the Orcs, is an example of a kid who can both be scared of the orcs because they remind him of something they’ve seen that scares them, or not being able to handle their empathy with the emotions of the protagonists in the story, and becoming as scared of the Orcs as the protagonists in the story.
Anyway, that’s how I understand this. But it’s just a matter of watching your kids and talking to them, paying attention, and you’ll see what they can handle or not.
I remember I once got a nightmare from Warrgs from the Hobbit which my father read to me, combined with watching a smurfs episode with some scary wolves. The dream was quite scary, quite typically me also, in a way. Parents would put their children outside to have them eaten by the Warrgs as a kind of sacrifice, so that the parents wouldn’t be eaten. In the end, I fantasized a gun and shot the Warrgs myself. I think I was about 6-7.
This transition from being ego-centric to starting to understand other people’s suffering (and happiness) can be tough on children and is something you can watch out for, is worth seeing if this develops healthily.
My brother is 12 years younger than me, so I was like Mommy #2. We watched Power Rangers together every day, and this was when everyone was screaming about how it would cause kids to be violent.
He has never once karate-chopped anyone. So there.
I tend to underestimate how scary or sad films my own children can take - I was worried about the scene in the beginning of The Elephant Babar, when Babar’s mother is shot :eek: It took me some time to realise that they aren’t as easily scared as my gut feelings try to tell me.
When my children were 5 and 7, they saw the second Harry Potter film, and the scene which made my five year old run from the room and hide in his bed was not the giant spiders, and not the flight from/fight with the huge basilisk. It was the scene in the beginning, when Harry almost falls out of the window… For him, at least, scenes which are somewhat realistic (ie. “that could happen to me”) are worse than obvious fantasy.
Recently (at age 6 and 8), both were really, really bothered about the Christmas dinner in Chaplin’s Gold Diggers, when our hero has invited the woman he’s in love with and her friends, and they don’t show up. He sits there alone in his small cabin, while the candles burn down and the food gets cold… Fortunately we get a happy ending, but it did give me second thoughts about those Chaplin films with heartbreaking endings, like The Kid.
My own guidelines have evolved into something like:
[ul][li]They are tougher than I think.[/li][li]If I’m in doubt, we’ll see the film at home, where the screen is small, the room is bright, and we can hit “pause” and take a break if needed. And I or my husband will sit with them, to comment and to notice if they’re bothered about something.[/li][li]The statement “All my friends have seen that film!” isn’t neccessarily true :)[/ul][/li]
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I’m curious about what kind of sexual content you (and others) edit out. I’m hard put to find any sexual content I’ve ever seen in films short of porn films that I’d be bothered about my children seeing.
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LilMiss and I were discussing this thread- she reminded me that Monster’s Ball was “Nah-stee” due to the sex scenes. Before we watched the movie I warned here there were sex scenes, and she said NBD. Saying it and meaning it are two different things! I do take into consideration the fact that she is very oogied out by the mere thought of sex at this stage in her life. She asked what a blow job was, but I didn’t get any farther than “The man’s penis… the woman’s mouth…” and she was begging me to stop talking abut it. (Actually it was more she clapped her hands over her hears and said “I DON’T WANNA KNOW” over and over again.) Going back to the Kill Bill movies, in Vol 1 she could not watch the scene in the hospital bed. That disturbed her. Now when she killed the guy? I had to avert my eyes.
Long story short, I don’t censor sex scenes but I let her know they’re there, just as I do with violent scenes. She does know it’s silly to be grossed out by sex scenes but not by scenes of random violence. We do discuss the morality of showing dead bodies on tv but a nipple throws the world into chaos.
Nudity is no problem. It doesn’t bother me if the kids see what naked people look like.
Sex depends on context. Casual sex is dangerous these days. Violence disguised as sex goes against what I’m trying to teach the kids. I try to keep them away from movies that give the wrong (according to my wife & me) message about sex.
Honestly, obscene language bothers me more than most sexual content. I’m trying to show the kids that real people in polite company don’t speak like the heros in a lot of today’s movies, and that talking like the South Park kids will get them grounded. Casual profanity is just an easy way to make up for a poor vocabulary.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the “scary” element as much as the “violence” element that you’ll want to keep tabs on. I’m trying to find a cite, but I recall studies in the past 5 years or so where the violence in media could have a post-traumatic shock sort of effect on children (I think the study was just on boys). It said something to the effect that just watching violence on screen caused an elevated adrenal response. (Think about a jarring violent scene and did your pulse accelerate). Here’s one study I did find:
Net, it’s hard to say how much violence kids should be exposed to. Less is probably better, but I’m also not in the “kids should never see any violence” camp myself. We try to keep it to small doses, and always make sure that they understand the difference in fictional media and reality. For example my son hasn’t seen the full version of the Matrix, but I’ve let him watch the training scene in the dojo. I’ve been reluctant to show them a film where the protagonist goes in shooting up the police and the army, since it’s a subtely conflicted message that might not be received terribly well by a young child. Plus it’s horribly violent. I don’t care if they see nudity on tv but we also don’t let them watch stuff with strong sexual content, either.
In the end they’re your kids and you have to decide how to bring them up. In the USA violence in media is generally more accepted than nudity or sexuality, but eventually they’re going to be exposed to all sorts of stuff, so your guidance should proceed what they see at a friend’s house.
Hmm…growing up, the flying monkies and wicked witch in Wizard Of Oz were pretty sinister, every film with Vincent Price made us kiddies at Saturday matinees scream, I watched Bambi’s mother die in a fire and Old Yeller was not exactly the feel-good movie of the year. So I think most young kids can handle a lot when watching films, and this is as good a time as any to get them to face their fears.
Granted, some kids are more sensitive than others, but unless you are screening Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I think the films you mentioned are pretty harmless and have enough positive things going for them to overcome some scary bits.
I’m trying to remember what I learned in college about this part of children’s development, but I remember something about kids not always knowing the difference between make-believe and reality up to the age of four or so. That’s why they’ll swear on a stack of bibles that they talked with Peter Pan for an hour last night and be furious when you say it’s impossible.
Also, some studies (no cite, just my possibly imprecise memory) have shown that kids exposed to violence in movies and tv can experience post traumatic stress syndrome. I have a cousin who regressed to bed wetting and such because he was taken to watch Snow White and the hunter freaked him out.
My parents steered me away from stuff they thought would be too much for me when I was really young. After about age ten, I could watch some scary or racy stuff but there’d be discussion of the content so my parents knew it was all being processed in as positive a way as possible. Communication is key, etc.
My rule is to always read the book before watching the movie. Forrest Gump is the only regret I have regarding that rule. Bitter book = extra sucky movie.
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