My new favorite "news" outlet is FARK. All kinds of good stuff there, and one need never brave the crummy looking new CNN interface.
At any rate, FARK pointed me to a great article about kid media. We pretty much stay away from theaters with Elise for the reasons this guy gives. Too much violence. Too much inanity. Too much potty humor. Too many vapid princesses.
Read the article and tell me what you think! (Yes, I'm fishing for more comments, I love it when y'all tell me what you think of this stuff.)
Monday, August 6, 2007
Deadly Parenting
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6 comments:
GREAT article! We don't see many movies, either, for the same reason -- although we all run together to the theatre for Shrek. Fortunately, ours realises that "better out than in" is NOT better in public.
I'm catching much flack for refusing to go to see Transformers -- because it's my one-woman boycott of taking a kids' toy and then making it PG-13 -- so the main fans of the movie before it opens are the same fans WHO CAN'T GO SEE IT.
Stick to your guns, guys -- it doesn't get any easier...but it's the right choice.
xxSunshine
Mea culpa! It's hard not to feel convicted of poor parenting after reading the article. I totally agree with him, but it's taken a number of years for me to get there. Knowledge of the young mind has changed so much since......you were born. We took you to see "The Exorcist" at the local drive-in when you were 14 months old. At 4 years you were into Barbie and Star Wars. We thought good parenting consisted of lots of stories, play, being outdoors, tons of books and reading, PBS kid shows and cereal without sugar. TV and movie ratings were just becoming known, and there was a lot of adjusting of standards along the way.
I have to recuse myself from this one as I am not a parent. It sounds right though. I don't like the idea of kids being exposed to brainless / violent / trampy / racist crap either. But then again, I tend to look at young minds as a resource to exploit to make the future better. "Ride a bike! Don't litter! Invest in alternative energy! Stay off my lawn!"
Yes, it's important to indoctrinate kids into a better way of thinking early on. :-D
I remember getting to watch Poltergeist on TV when I was a wee littel tyke. I must have been younger than 10. Evidently mom and dad had had a pretty heated discussion about it: mom was convinced that it would turn me into a horrible person and give me nightmares; dad figured TBS had done a fair enough job of censoring it and that it couldn't be too bad for me. I remember enjoying the movie immensly and I'm told that I slept like an angle that night.
Then again, I was a weird kid. I tended to get more upset about what people did around me rather than what happened on TV. I guess I never really watched anything that remotely mirrored the life I lived in Three Forks. Maybe some learn to differentiate between reality and make-believe earlier than others. Maybe I just watched enough TV as a kiddo that I learned to seperate the useful from the useless.
It's a fine art, ya know.
Yahoo! Comments!!
I don't like the toys turned into PG-13 ratings, either. I especially don't violence, largely because I know it freaks Elise out, real or imagined. Ratatoulle was great ~except~ for the part at the beginning with the old lady shooting at rats with her shotgun.
Andy was doing some reading recently where he discovered that the motion picture rating people are basically a censorship committee. There are no guidelines, no appeals. And, if you get a NC-17 slapped on your movie none of the big chains will show it because it's too much of a hassle. The only thing we know from experience is that any amount of violence is okay, but the slightest bit of (kinky or homosexual) sex will doom a film. All very interesting.
I think that the standards set by my folks were pretty reasonable, and it is a basic foundation for how we do things here at our house. Now, there is such a realization that parents will spend any amount of cash to consume media for their kids, so there are a lot more options than there were when I was growing up. Unfortunately, a good chunk of them are crap. I like to think I can weed out the worst of it but HAH! I know I can just do my best and see what happens.
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