A football game? Because of the violence? Am I being whooshed here?
There are some bad ads associated with football games, though.
No. Most decidedly not a whoosh.
One of the twins likes to bully the other, e.g., M wrapping arms around S and taking him down, or simply pushing hard enough to knock him down. Seeing the football players rough each other up like that isn’t a good example, we thought. BTW, they’re 2 years old.
So, we got rid of the game - either turned off the TV or switched to something safe.
My kid was extremely compassionate and could also tell the difference between movies and reality, so I had a very liberal rating system for him. No hard core sex, particularly rape situations. General movie sex and nudity were ok. Violence, for the most part, was ok. Monsters were fine too, as he never freaked or woke up with nightmares. It all depends on the kid. He may have remembered scenes and talked about them for a while afterward, but did not do so out of fear, so I had no problem with it.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing for a child to get emotionally jacked up over a movie. Hell, I do, so I would expect the same out of a child. In my opinion, unless it is having a negative effect on the child, everything within reason is fair game. Only you and your kid can decide what reasonable is.
Yep. Same thing happens with my cousins (boys 20 years younger than I). Football makes them want to try what they’ve seen, especially because they know it’s real, not special effects. What they fail to grasp, however, are three important things: the ton of padding and protective gear football players wear, the amount of training they go through to learn how to tackle and be tackled relatively safely, and the huge number of injuries and general wear-and-tear that football players bodies’ receive despite all that.
I’m not one to stop kids playing to avoid a few bruises and scrapes. But the first time I watched Cousin A’s head snap backwards during a “tackle” was the last time I let them play or watch football on my watch!
Yup.
I think my son in law will lead his twins to hunting and fishing, and a deep appreciation and respect for Nature. He isn’t at all interested in football. I
admire him.
Yeah, we did Twister a week or two ago as well. Our six year-old loved the movie but became very upset when she thought the dog at the beginning of the movie was going to be sucked up in the tornado. “Run, Toby, run!!!”
Daddy didn’t help matters by explaining that Toby lived a long life and finally passed away in January 1977, surrounded by those he loved. Daddy is stupid this way, you see… 
“Toby DIED??!?!??? WHY???!??!!?”
… oops…
She calmed down a bit, thought about things and then asked “But the actor-dog, the actor-dog is still alive, right?”
blessed relief!
“Yes, Sophie. The ‘actor dog’ is still alive and probably still appearing in movies.”
I can’t tell ahead of time what’s going to upset my son, so I don’t take him to many movies. It seems that suspenseful music and a sense of possible future peril may be what unnerves him. I was sorry we took him to the Incredibles (it was a pretty violent movie, by kid standards, despite there being no blood) and to his credit he asked to leave the theatre during one scene. He recently did the same thing during “The Water Horse.”
I’d rather err on the side of caution.
Him seeing nudity doesn’t bother me at all. Sex probably would.
We’ve always been fairly laissez faire about what our son sees. He’s nine and is allowed to watch all manner of PG-13 movies and even some R if we know that it’s R because they have “fuck” in it one too many times or something like that. Fairly graphic sex or violence to innocent people is avoided if it’s too realistically depicted. He’s into rock and roll and wrestling also and has accidentally run into boobies in some concert DVD’s. We allow him to peruse YouTube for rock and roll and wrestling stuff too. He enjoys Howard Stern and often mentions Beetlejuice and Gary the Retard (and looks them up on YouTube). We don’t enjoy the porn stars and strippers anyway, but we are more inclined to change the station when he’s in the car if one of those segments comes up. At 2 1/2 he was watching the Sopranos with us and wanted to know why Uncle Junior was being so fresh when they depicted him as a young man kicking some guy’s ass in. The only thing that he ever watched that was too upsetting was E.T. when he was about 3. He watched the whole thing, saw he get ready to go home, turned to us, asked “Where’s his Mommy and Daddy?” and burst into tears.
Oh, and we had to leave before the end of that Lemony Snicket movie.
So, sex and violence = okay. Orphans/lost kids = bad.
ET is a hard one to take at any age. I bought it for Sophie the week of a long car drive, expecting her to enjoy it and possibly cry a little… heh, expectations were met. She fell in love with ET in the first half of the movie, and gasped in horror when Michael found the sick-gray ET in the creek. Her emotional high began to crash, at one point, when all seemed lost for ET, she was holding the little DVD player/TV saying “This is a bad movie! This is a bad movie!”.
Later, ET opened his eyes repeating “ET phone home” and Sophie whooped with joy. She was enraptured for the next 15-odd minutes until… "Does he have to go away? I don’t want ET to leave, Mommy! 
" 
But now she’ll request to see it. Once a couple of weeks ago I said “But doesn’t it make you sad, Sophie?” She replied “I want to get in my blankets with my stuffed animals and have a good cry, Daddy.” Sophie is so girl.
Death, for my seven year old.
It is his besetting fear, and it paralyses him. It will sometimes come over him from nowhere; he’ll go sheet white and come to me, and whisper, “I don’t want to die Mummy.” It is heartbreaking because we are all going to do it one day, and there’s nothing I can do to protect him from it. He realised that he was going to die some time about four years old which apparently is very early.
I KNOW he is going to die, and so are we all, but he doesn’t need it shoving in his face right now while he is so unequipped to deal with it. So we don’t watch the news much with him around, and try to change the channel before anyone dies in movies. We even have to watch what we say around him. The other day my 11 year old innocently asked me “Do you think that when we are deeply asleep, that state is close to what death might feel like?”
OMG. Very interesting philosophical question and one that I would like to get into with YOU ALONE but could you just turn around and look at the stricken face of your brother, who will now refuse to go to sleep for the next week???
Heh, there is someone on this very message board who has admitted to masturbating to that clip. The answer would surprise you too.
My kids could watch anything with relative impunity…until that Stephen King movie with the clown Pennywise.
After that it was nightmares galore and screaming tantrums anytime I said, “We *float * down here”…
Dunno what all their fuss was about really. :smack:
2 girls, 1 cup
The most disturbing thing that I know my kids ever watched was the Challenger blowing up twenty years ago. Our oldest was just 10 years old then, and really excited about that mission because he felt a personal connection to the space program. Vance Brand is from Longmont, Colo., and Jason had met him (of course, so had about 10,000 other school children). And Jason knew one of the elementary school teachers who had competed to participate in the teacher-space program. So when Challenger blew up, Jason sat there with tears streaming down his cheeks and asking, “What about her kids?” meaning Christa McAuliffe’s students.
I suppose some of the parents in this thread would have shielded their children from the whole thing, but I disagree with that. For one thing, you never know what’s going to push a kid’s buttons or why. But even had I known then what I know now, I’d have let him watch the coverage of the Challenger disaster. He was curious about it, he wanted to know. He learned from it, and one of the things he learned was that bad things sometimes happen to good people, and for no apparent reason. (Only much later did we learn about the now-infamous O-rings and the cold.) Life is sometimes random and tragic, and it slaps us in the face when we least expect it.
I wonder sometimes, if parents shield their children from all the “bad” stuff that happens while growing up, how would those children handle something like war or natural disaster when they grow up?
Forgive the bump, but I have a follow-up question that I didn’t think rated its own thread.
This thread reminded me of one from years ago. A poster was over 18 and living with her dad, stepmom, and 10 y/o half brother. Stepmom warned her that if she left her journal in a public area, it would be thrown out, because li’l bro “didn’t need to see” the content. After months of compliance, she had a brain fart and left it on the washing machine (she lived in the basement) and stepmom threw it out with extreme prejudice.
According to the poster, the only objectionable material was a sketch of a nude woman (art, not porn) and a story or something about self-mutilation. Now, while I certainly agree that the kid doesn’t need to have nudes or stories about cutting forced down his throat, I was never clear on exactly what the harm would be if he saw ONE nude, or ONE story about cutting. Especially since the story would probably have been way over his head and of no interest to him.
Is there any reason why a kid can’t just, I dunno, process unfamiliar things? Isn’t that part of childhood and growing up – seeing or hearing things you don’t understand, and learning to deal with them? What was the greatest possible harm from his seeing a nude? He’d grow up to be a rapist? He’d become a homosexual because a naked woman was so scary he’d never want to see one IRL? If he read the story about cutting, would he immediately grab a knife and start slicing up his entire arm? I’m just not sure I’m down with pretending that anything not kid-friendly doesn’t exist.