My boys are 7. Now you have to understand that my wife is a Halloween nut, and so having catalogs from the Anatomical Chart Company, and other macabre stuff around the house has been the norm since they were born. That said, I look at the movies I’ve let them see and they really don’t have a bearing on the rating system. PG has been perfectly acceptable, in certain cases, since they were toddlers (think Star Wars)
I can’t say that we’ve permitted R rated movies, but the occasional PG-13 sneaks in. About the only think in PG-13 and lower movies I’ve had an issue with is ones depicting Suicide (Stargate comes to mind)…I just don’t want them encountering that concept.
The Mummy series, space war films (Avatar with the caveat that ‘those people are using language I don’t want you using’), lightly violent fantasy (LOTR series), I can’t seem to get worked up that a 7 year old is seeing a movie that’s ‘rated’ for a 13 year old.
Do you find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with this? Do you think PG rated movies are ‘under’ rated to give parents an out if they feel they don’t want to evaluate what their kids are watching?
Likewise, my kids are running through Halo:Reach. I’ve been watching it and playing with them, and I don’t get why it ranks an ‘M’ rating. Yes, it’s violent, but in a cartoony fashion. I hope I’m not mistaken, but my kids seem to be able to differentiate between what they see on-screen and real life.
Naw, I took my 8 year-old to see Avatar and the first PG13 movie she ever saw was when she was 3 or 4… but it was the last Star Wars movie, and I’m positive the only way that thing earned a PG13 rating was because Lucas bribed somebody.
We’ve also watched large swaths of Moulin Rouge! since she was 4.
What bothers me the most in regards to films for my kid is language. We’ve watch ID4 on TV regularly (on cable channels), and I was unpleasantly surprised once putting in a copy of the DVD and finding out the movie was full of unecessary (imho) cursing. I had to turn it off.
Oh, and at the age of 5 her favorite movie was Tom Cruise’s version of The War of the Worlds*. She was also a HUGE LOTR (movie) fan at the same age as well.
*Kids are odd sometimes, aren’t they? I once asked her what her favorite movie quote was and, after explaining the concept to her, she thought about it and then yelled “No, Robbie, not like Europe!” I about crashed the car from laughing.
Right now she’s going through a big Napolean Dynamite thing and she’s got the voices down perfectly in some scenes. It’s funny listening to her do the dialogue in the tot scene:
“Napolean, give me some of your tots!”
“No, go find your own!”
“Come on, give me some of your tots!”
“No, I’m starving! I didn’t eat anything today!”
<she kicks, as in the movie>
“Gross! You idiot!”
After I pressed submit, I remembered the last Transformers movie…I could have EASILY taken my kids to it…if they’d edited about 2 minutes of dialog. Racists Robots, lapdances and Ball Shots didn’t really need to be in a Hasbro movie.
Rating systems are fine IF they include the reasons why a certain rating has been assigned.
Every child is different and the parents who pay attention to ratings need to understand why in order to make intelligent decisions on their own.
For my own kids I used the “watch/read/play it myself” method of rating. This is exhausting and I gave it up gradually starting when they were about 12 in favour of the “talk to me if something concerns you”.
Some kids have really sticky memories for images–if they see something disturbing, it stays on the back of their eyelids for weeks or months. Some adults are like this, too, but it seems stronger for kids. For kids like that, I think the adults in their lives have some responsibility to monitor things–the kids won’t remember that the last time they watched a graphic movie they had nightmares for weeks, but the adults should–not because it will warp them for life, but because it’s a pretty miserable experience to go through.
I’m still shocked that the movie Big got a PG rating, despite a scene of the main character fondling a woman’s breasts (and an implied sexual encounter, with Josh exclaiming “I get to be on top!” … talking about the bunkbed), and another scene where his friend screams FUCK YOU. With the exception of those two, it’s a great kid’s film, and was my favorite movie when I was 7.
When my daughter was 11 we let her watch There’s Something About Mary EXCEPT for ‘that scene’ when we stopped the tape and made her go in the next room until it was over. She went, but complained loudly and bitterly, LOL. When we saw Titanic at the movie theater, she was very embarrassed at the brief drawing-Rose-in-the-nude and held her popcorn box in front of her eyes until it was over. Kids are funny!
I have used the CAP-alert ratings to see if I want to see a movie. I don’t like on screen violence and he used to be more particular than any other rating system. For example, T2 was really nasty for me because of the initial scene where that guy lands on the grill and the drano in the syringe in the neck. The audience found the guy on the grill funny, but I still see that in my nightmares.
The thing I look to avoid my children seeing is racism. Especially casual racism not addressed in the movie or used as humor and use of racial slurs. We curse, but we don’t use racial slurs. I can’t complain about a movie containing swearing would introduce them to strong language; I can make that complaint about racial slurs. But, any movie that shows a child using strong language is right out. We teach them that children swearing is not endearing or cute and won’t show a movie that counters that message.
Right now we use the method of having one of us watch it first and decide.