So... what's the deal with showing movies to my kid?
Mikey just turned eight years old. My wife and I try to keep some control over the media he sees. We carefully consider the movies we let him watch... for example, some friends of ours want to go see
Iron Man this weekend with us, but we want to check our "family movie review sites" list (see below for the list) so we'll know what we're up against before we take him to see it. Although he had already seen all of the other Star Wars movies, we pre-screened and thought long and hard about
Revenge of the Sith before we took him to see it because of Anakin, you know, bursting into flames and all. (We ultimately took him, and he loved it... and no nightmares afterward. he understood the good/evil aspects of it, I think.) I cringe every time a new
Shrek movie comes out because of the slightly off-color jokes and homosexual double entendres. At home we have
a special DVD player that we can use to seamlessly "clean up" things that we wouldn't approve of him watching without compromising the movie's story (think: automatic "network TV" version). He knows which shows on TV that he's not allowed to watch, and if one of them comes on he won't watch it (yep, he's a great kid!) Grandparents ask our permission to let him watch movies. And yet still he sees things that we wouldn't approve of. How is this possible?
This morning Mikey told me that he saw
Horton Hears a Who! at school. I was incredulous... is that even out on DVD? I asked him if it was the computer-animated one like
Ice Age or the cartoon one like the old
How The Grinch Stole Christmas. He told me enough detail that I'm convinced that he actually did see the 2008 theatrical version... we haven't even seen it as a family, so I actually had to look it up and find some obscure details to ask him about (he knew them). I looked it up on
Amazon.com... you can't buy it on DVD yet. Sometimes you can rent movies before you can buy them... he tells me the teacher said she rented it. His teacher is not the "illegally downloading movies off the Internet" type, so I have to believe she got it legitimately somehow. But how? (Maybe she had a wonderful, awful idea... oh wait. That's
the wrong Dr. Seuss story...)
The first time I learned that Mikey was seeing movies at school was when he told me they had watched
Transformers. That movie was one I actually specifically wanted to
avoid letting him see because of
some sexually-suggestive things in the movie. When the movie had just come out, my brother
IMd me one day and told me he had seen the movie and it was great. (This was before I had read up on it.) "Cool! Someone else told me they liked it," I said. "Nothing bad for the kiddies, then?" His reply was: "woah...no, I didn't say take Mikey. I said it rocked." My brother is no prude, but even he cautioned me on that movie. And yet they apparently watched it at Mikey's Christian school, presumably with masturbation jokes and other and sexual humor intact. Something is weird here. (For the record, we probably would have watched it at home eventually with
the Clearplay DVD player, but that's neither here nor there.)
They watch movies on special occasions at church, too. Once a month we have a special service on a Sunday night, and often they run long, so in the children's church they'll show a movie. A year or so ago when I first found out about this I asked our children's pastor if he could let the parents know what movie was coming up in case it was something we didn't approve of. He told me that he carefully pre-screens every movie and they're all OK. So no early notices of what movie is coming up have materialized. Now, it's my church, my "family", so in general I'm very comfortable with what is considered appropriate or not, but this is my kid here. Wouldn't it be courteous to let me know about something as potentially controversial as a movie showing?
(I won't even go into the fact that every DVD on the market has a incarceration-serious warning that it is illegal to show the DVD in public.)
Worse is the fact that the good folks at Mikey's church and at his school (and they
are good folks) apparently have not considered the possibility that even if I
do approve of the movie, maybe I would like to share that movie-viewing experience with my son instead of him seeing the movie for the first time with someone else. I suppose by the time something is out on DVD presumably people have gone to see it in movie theaters, but often we don't financially have the luxury of paying $20-25 to see something in a theater when we could wait three months and get it for $5 from
Blockbuster, or sometimes free from
the library.
So I appear to have more or less lost control of my child's movie-viewing experiences. I knew this would happen eventually, but I kind of hoped for it to be when his age had reached the double digits. Maybe I'm old-fashioned... the first time I saw
an R-rated movie I was in college and went with friends, and if I had realized ahead of time that it was R-rated I probably wouldn't have watched it. But it seems like the people I trust with my little boy could have a little more respect for my discretion about something like that.
My list of family movie review sites:
Plugged In movies section - from Focus on the Family
Christian Spotlight on Entertainment movies sectionKids-In-MindScreen It! Movie Reviews - used to be more useful before they went to a subscriber model, but still some good info
By glancing through the information on these four sites, you can know basically anything that is going to happen in a movie that might surprise, embarrass, or otherwise upset you if your kids see it. You will also know almost everything about the movie's basic plot and you may run into spoilers, so if you prefer to be surprised, better just go pre-screen it yourself.
You might also want to look up some movies you've watched that you consider "okay" to get some perspective. You might find that some of these sites are less relaxed about content than you are. You also might be shocked to see how corrupt some of the stuff in kid movies looks when you consider it in the light of day instead of the dark of a theater!
So I ran up to the backstage door and got there just in time. Mikey was in the service with us, and so were 
) and Pastor Bob prayed with us. Honestly, she and I were both praying along so hard that we don't remember a word he said, except that Cathy remembers him using the word "demand" because it startled her! I hope they give us a tape or CD like they did with Mikey!
When it was our turn we woke her up and went down to the studio and got some really cute pictures done; maybe once our prints come I'll be able to post a few. Afterward we stopped my Meme's house to tell her thanks for her help, then we came home and had some dinner. We had some time before bedtime so I recommended that we watch something we had recorded on the DVR. This weekend we already watched 
Mikey received his Wolf rank in Cub Scouts last night, along with his soccer belt loop. Congratulations, Mikey!
We enjoyed the movie anyway, and apparently Mikey and Cathy had a terrific time at the BMG show! Mikey tells me he's going to write a blog post about the show so the whole world will know what goes on at Blue Man Group concerts... so stay tuned for that soon!
