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So, I am kind of dead curious about something now. How old were you when your parents started allowing you to see rated R movies (and under what circumstances), and if you are a parent how old were your kids (or will your kids be) when you allow them? And also, I'm kind of wondering if when you were born affects this, because there were actually a lot more on the No You May not list for my kid than there were on my parent's list for me, even though we had roughly the same rules about it, on account of I think there were more movies with the kinds of graphic violence and extreme situations when my kid was growing up than when I did.
Like, okay...I mentioned in comments of the navel gazing post...in my house growing up, once we hit about, I guess 10 or 11 if one or both of my parents were going to see a rated R movie we were pretty much allowed to go with if we wanted as long as it didn't appear there would be excessive violence/gore/adult situations on the extreme sort of end mostly, or we could go to whatever other movie that was PG playing at the same time or whatever. We weren't allowed to go *without* a parent, and there were some movies on the No You May Not list even with until about I...want to say around 14, when I was basically allowed to go see whatever I wanted with or without a parent.
Just, in general my parents had pretty lax rules about media consumption in that we were allowed to read whatever we wanted from always (if you could pull it off a shelf and read the words in it? then it was your decision). Open communication was always encouraged about whatever it is we were reading or watching, but the decision (except, like I said up there in the case of movies with high gore/violence content) was up to us? Which, I don't know if it was just the lack of taboo, or if I was a boring kid, but to be honest most of the time I opted for the more 'kid friendly' movie in the theater, and the only arguments I remember about the No You May Not list was my growing love of horror at the time, and not being allowed to see a lot of those movies in theater (and on VHS) until a few years later.
In terms of my own kid, I mostly followed the same sort of deal. Read anything you want. Light restriction of movies/tv in that nudity/swearing were not dealbreakers but extreme violence of any kind would be until teenage years, when I started leaving it up to him.
So how did your parents handle it? And how do you/would you (if applicable) handle/plan to handle it with your own kids?
Like, okay...I mentioned in comments of the navel gazing post...in my house growing up, once we hit about, I guess 10 or 11 if one or both of my parents were going to see a rated R movie we were pretty much allowed to go with if we wanted as long as it didn't appear there would be excessive violence/gore/adult situations on the extreme sort of end mostly, or we could go to whatever other movie that was PG playing at the same time or whatever. We weren't allowed to go *without* a parent, and there were some movies on the No You May Not list even with until about I...want to say around 14, when I was basically allowed to go see whatever I wanted with or without a parent.
Just, in general my parents had pretty lax rules about media consumption in that we were allowed to read whatever we wanted from always (if you could pull it off a shelf and read the words in it? then it was your decision). Open communication was always encouraged about whatever it is we were reading or watching, but the decision (except, like I said up there in the case of movies with high gore/violence content) was up to us? Which, I don't know if it was just the lack of taboo, or if I was a boring kid, but to be honest most of the time I opted for the more 'kid friendly' movie in the theater, and the only arguments I remember about the No You May Not list was my growing love of horror at the time, and not being allowed to see a lot of those movies in theater (and on VHS) until a few years later.
In terms of my own kid, I mostly followed the same sort of deal. Read anything you want. Light restriction of movies/tv in that nudity/swearing were not dealbreakers but extreme violence of any kind would be until teenage years, when I started leaving it up to him.
So how did your parents handle it? And how do you/would you (if applicable) handle/plan to handle it with your own kids?
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I'm sure my parents noticed all the violent stuff I was consuming, but it was never a thing, like they didn't try and talk to me about it, as far as I remember. Of course when I was reading or watching something with sex I didn't want them to know about it, but because of the awkwardness rather than because I thought I'd get in trouble. Basically I just didn't have any content restrictions growing up. They also never cared about swearing, which may be related. They were (and are) eccentric academics, and not like the other parents in many ways.
With my kids...IDK, I think I'd like to be a little stricter about watching really violent stuff, but mostly I can't imagine taking a different approach than my parents. Like, the idea of saying no to a book is completely foreign to me. I feel like when I got exposed to ideas that I was too young to understand, I just kind of glided over them for a few years until they made sense, and no harm was done. Well, as far as I can tell. *g*
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It never even occured to me that there would be books you weren't allowed to read growing up. Like, I may not have been allowed to go see many horror movies until I was a teenager, but horror books? All of them, all the time starting at 9 or 10 without a peep from my parents other than that time when I was 10 and reading The Shining and I stayed up late because I couldn't stop reading...and my dad saw the light on under the door and opened it to find out why I was up at such an ungodly hour and I was at a really tense place so I started screaming? And the peep he uttered was mostly to laugh a lot and remind me I had to get up for school in the morning. :D
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But, I mean, for both myself as a child and then my kid as a parent, by the time teenagehood arrived there really were *no* restrictions. And it never would have been a thing for my parents or for myself as a parent to restrict for anything like nudity or swearing. And, never, ever EVER books of any kind. Ever.
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We were always allowed to read whatever we could get our hands on (as the fact of me having read The Shining before age 11 indicates). I can't actually remember what the rules might have been, if any, about seeing movies. I actually doubt there were any, much like with the books.
No kids or prospect of kids to make or not make rules for... so in my household it's annnnaaarrrrrchyyyyyyyy. \o/
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Yeah, books. I can't even really fathom the idea that if you wanted to read something you wouldn't be allowed to? It seems so alien to me, and I definitely had the same 'if you can physically read the words on the page, it ain't up to me what you choose to read' with kiddo.
With movies, I think I started to appreciate my parents stance on visual horror/violence/gore when I was in the parental shoes? I dunno if it was just because that is how I was raised, but I was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of kiddo seeing that stuff until there was a 'teen' attached to his age. Though I did let him watch most of Buffy at 10, so.
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As for books... we didn't really have books in the house (magazines, but very few books aside from some of my dad's college textbooks), and we didn't get to the public library very often, so basically I read what I could check out of the school library, which in small-town Texas was not a lot. So my parents really didn't monitor my book intake either; it was a de facto "read whatever your literacy level can handle" situation. What this meant was that when we visited my grandparents I read EVERYTHING I could get my hands on, which meant Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and the Bible at one house and John Jakes and James Michener novels at the other house (plus my aunt's stash of romance novels after I found them hidden in her closet). And I also read Anne McCaffrey's Pern series at what was in retrospect probably an inappropriately young age, because my parents had never heard of them and had no idea that there was lots of sex involved, which I feel certain that they would have strenuously objected to. I was really only in it for the telepathic dragons; I mostly skipped the sex stuff, because who cared?
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I was really only in it for the telepathic dragons; I mostly skipped the sex stuff, because who cared?
Ahahahaha. You are amazing and I <3 you. Also, I am horrified for tiny you because the idea of growing up without books everywhere overflowing shelves and constant trips to the library makes me sad :( :( :(
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My dad was (and is) a workaholic. My mom did the bored housewife routine: serial weird hobbies and, eventually, drinking. Upon reflection, it is not surprising that I struggle with work/life balance. Heh.
I am horrified for tiny me too! Years ago,
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I swear that thing gave me more nightmares than any of the slasher films ever did. Though, really it doesn't hold up logically because after an apocalypse I wager you'd still be able to *find* some glasses close enough to your prescription or whatever. BUT STILL.
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But no, no TV reruns for me -- no Twilight Zone, Star Trek, etc. No new shows either, really -- I missed the Twin Peaks phenomenon, for example. I was a PBS baby, and in elementary school watched Saturday morning cartoons and the Muppet Show. My dad watched the news and Wall Street Week. My mom watched Cagney and Lacey, St. Elsewhere, Remington Steele, and eventually LA Law. In middle school I started taping MTV's 120 Minutes. After I left for college my brother started watching The History Channel a lot. But we weren't really a TV family. Basically I didn't watch TV until X-Files my last year of college. I kind of didn't GET television as a concept.
My life has changed a lot since then. Heh.
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My younger (11) is still a bit more limited, but I'm more concerned with moral complexities or certain types of ritualized violence than I am with sex or nudity.
One thing i've found is that I'm less worried about things on TV than I am in the movies...I think, because I\it's less immersive/overwhelming? When they were younger, i'd preview sometimes and they're still good about closing their eyes when i tell them (did that for a scene in The Following for younger one when we watched)
It's really hard and depends on kids and films...
In Germany, you can't enter a movie theatre younger than what's listed regardless of parent, so there wasn't much to decide for my parents. TV was less violent but had more sex. and I pretty much read what I wanted once I found my way to the library...
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I did not know that about Germany, that you can't even with a parent.
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the collective protects the child from its parents in the positive interpretation...the state has more influence than the parents in the negative one :)
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But i'm not sure how I'd feel if I didn't agree with German norms :)
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I got my own TV pretty early - at 10 or 11 or even sooner, and one of my brothers had a huge collection of horror movies, video games and all kinds of stuff I shouldn't have had access to.
In my case, I'm thinking it's got something to do with the way my parents consume media. They never read books much and didn't grow up with television like that - for my mother, TV has always been something that runs in the background, something that doesn't affect her emotionally, nothing engaging.
And I don't think it had a negative impact on me, either. Nonetheless, I would definitely handle things differently with my own kids, should I ever have any. Probably like you do it, and then I think it's important to assess a kid's individual level of emotional stability.
I was born in '89, btw.
ETA: My parents or brothers wouldn't have taken me to a movie I wasn't legally allowed to see, though. Laws are a bit different here in Germany anyway, but I had no interest in seeing anything I wasn't allowed to at the movies either way. Thinking about it now, I wasn't *interested* in watching these things on TV either - they were simply available.
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And, yeah, I think you may very well be right about your mom's idea of what was actually on/available vs. what was? You are only a few years older than my kid (OMG I AM OLD), and I really do think of a lot of what was out there when I was growing up as rather tame compared to what was around when kiddo was growing up. Like, even the slasher horror film explosion of the 80s that I loved so dearly at the time...compared to the torture porn horror that came later....it is not the same thing at all. But if I wasn't the sort who was deeply immersed in media I might not necessarily even *know* that horror movies had changed like that.
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But my age means that there was much less graphic violence on TV when I was 10/11. My mum and to some extent my dad were open to discussing anything I bought up with them about what I had seen or read. I appreciate that in hindsight.
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But yeah, there is a shift in what is kind of around between even when I was a kid and when my own kid was born (I was born in 73, him in 92). But now there's also DVRs and onDemand and DVD players which make it easier to pre-screen things and/or fast forward through that *one* scene, so that's a bonus as well.
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With my kids, it depended on the kid. My daughter (now 24) was drastically restricted, to the point that she wasn't allowed to watch mainstream TV until she was nine or ten; she grew up on a diet of PBS, and limited PBS at that. Mainly, I put those restrictions in place because she didn't have a very strong sense of fantasy vs. reality when it came to visual stuff. Reading was never restricted, though I kept anything that was drastically adult (Anne Rice's porn, fanfic, etc.) put away. Of course, when she was about twelve, she started staying up late and watching Queer as Folk with me (with lots and lots of conversation about context), and then she discovered slash fanfic via Gundam Wing, so that was pretty much the end of any restrictions.
My son, on the other hand, never had any restrictions at all, because even from three or four he had this absolutely crystal clear concept of the divide between fantasy and reality. I still kept an eye on gore and violence, so as not to overwhelm him with it, but I'm not a big fan of, say, Tarantino, or blood-and-guts horror, so there wasn't a lot for him to be watching anyway. To this day (at age 17), the only two things that even begin to blur his line enough to actually be problematic for him are Arnold Vosloo mid-transformation in The Mummy (he does not like anthropomorphic skeletons at all) and the weeping angels in Doctor Who. I keep forgetting about that last one and sending him links to cool images from Tumblr (like the Xmas tree topper, which was awesome!), and he keeps IMing me back with "GEE THANKS, MOM." Oops? He doesn't read a lot (he needed vision therapy when he was younger, and didn't learn to read until he was seven; it's still physically harder for him than for the average person), but I never restricted the audio books he listened to, either. Mostly that was LotR, Terry Pratchett, and Douglas Adams.
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I'm sure they rented R rated movies or would-be-R-rated movies (my parents watch the most depressing foreign films) all the time and allowed us to watch with them, but when they remembered to think about ratings (because I asked for the film) they abode by them.
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Huh, now that I check, Life of Brian was rated R too, and that I watched a dozen times. Again, though, I think that one was from the library, so my parents didn't have to think about it.
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Oddly, my reading wasn't restricted at all, so I read everything I could get my hands on, including things that were probably far beyond what I should be reading in content and age level: loads and loads of romance novels, Pern, C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength (which is all kinds of disturbing with some of its imagery), The Scarlet Letter. Never a big deal made, never checked on. I knew I could talk to my mother if I wanted to have anything explained, but I never did.
Times are quite different now. My husband and I make a point about talking about media with our children, even though they are still young (one's eight and one's three). At those ages, most children only need to be guarded from anything that will cause nightmares. Youngest can't watch Doctor Who. Eldest can watch anything as long as it's under PG-13, and we've seen it before. (She knows her level of comfort with media and will tune out and stop watching if it's not her thing.)
One thing I've kept an eye on is feminist-friendly (or unfriendly) media. I have girls, so that's something that bothers me. Most children's programming is much friendlier in that respect, but there are a few that annoy me, like Higglytown Heroes, which got banned quickly when I discovered that one female character, who would dream up imaginative schemes, was constantly shot down by another female character and told that such schemes wouldn't work.
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One thing I've kept an eye on is feminist-friendly (or unfriendly) media. I have girls, so that's something that bothers me.
*nod* that is definitely a thing I tried to talk to my kid about regarding whatever he or we were watching as he was growing up. I don't think I ever flat out stopped him from watching anything, but I sure enough would provide running commentary or discussion after.
I know my sister-in-law tends to restrict based on behaviors she doesn't want copied. So there's one cartoon she won't let them watch entirely because she thinks it encourages rude behavior.
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Then, my mom was all "I have failed as a mother if you do not watch The Godfather Saga!" Now, she's like "In retrospect, you might have been a little young for that..."
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If I ever have children, I suspect my approach will be similar to yours, Eunice. But I myself can only stand violence and gore up to network television levels, and my tolerqnce of sexual/sexualized violence is even lower, so if my 16 year old wanted to watch A Clockwork Orange I probably wouldn't try to stop them (though I would want to warn them), but they couldn't watch it with me around.
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Heh, yeah...even if my parents hadn't had horror on the No You May Not list during the interim before I was allowed to choose for myself, I still probably wouldn't have seen those movies until I was allowed to watch without a parent, because they wouldn't have wanted to go see them.
Like, for example they had absolutely zero interest in the Jon Hughes ouvre, so while I did see Witness in the movie theater, I didn't get to see Breakfast Club until later on VHS...because it was R and a parent wasn't gonna go with me, not because of objections, but because they had absolutely zero interest in teen angst as entertainment. :D
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My mom's objection was definitely the violence and sexual situations, and she was probably right about it being a little too mature for me at that age, but I was way more freaked out by the way the Nazis crept into the story, kind of under the radar, and started beating and killing people (and Natalia's poor little dog!) than I was about the sex.
I'd seen some pretty disturbing movies on TV, like Night of the Living Dead (which I saw when I was about the same age) and The Birds (when I was 5 or 6), and The World at War, which I watched with my dad, was a very graphic documentary series about WWII, so I guess I didn't really get why my mom thought Cabaret was... worse?
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so I guess I didn't really get why my mom thought Cabaret was... worse?
I dunno, that does seem odd...but parental instinct is not always rational? I liked to pretend it was when my kiddo was growing up, but no...sometimes you just kinda flail about?
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Poor Gwyneth Paltrow's head in a box :(
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I was a voracious reader as a kid; I'm sure my parents were grateful when I could ride my bike the mile to the public library and they could stop driving me. I'd come home with a backpack full every time. In comparison, they themselves were casual readers, and they never understood my love for sci-fi and fantasy. My mom to this day hates sci-fi, blaming a movie she saw as a kid that scared the bejeesus out of her.
They never cared about what I was reading (maybe because what I was reading was so foreign to them); I don't ever remember restrictions on any of my books. When I was maybe 10 or so, I tried to check out Masquerade at the library, which for some reason was classified as an adult section book. My parents signed off on taking the children's section limitation off my library card, and my reading options exploded. The only time they ever interfered with my reading was when I was being punished; the most effective method they ever came up with was denying me TV and reading for fun. I got very good at sneaking books. :)
When I went home with one of my roommates in college, my mind was blown first by her family's enormous collection of sci-fi and fantasy books, and then by the revelation that her parents had greatly restricted what she could read. That would have been torture for me.
TV and movies were sort of the same, as I don't remember a lot of "You can't watch this!" but since my parents controlled my access to both, I guess there was vetting going on. I watched a lot of nighttime soaps with them (Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest), police procedurals (Cagney & Lacey, Hill Street Blues), and sitcoms (Cosby Show, Family Ties). I knew I was getting to be a big kid the farther I could stay up into the annual showings of "Sound of Music" and "Wizard of Oz". ;)
We didn't go to see a lot of movies when I was a kid, but we took advantage of rentals once we got a VCR. During the summer, I watched a ton of movies on cable, too, as well as soap operas. I hated horror (and still do), and the cable channels didn't show much that was really adult during the day, so I never really watched too much above my age. When I got old enough and had an allowance, I would bike to the cheap movie theater to watch PG movies on my own.
My experience with my son has been almost completely different; I let him control what's on TV most of the time (which means on-demand or DVRed Disney and Cartoon Network, or videogames), saving my stuff to watch until after his bedtime. We've shown him Star Wars IV-VI, a little bit of Star Trek, the first few Harry Potters, the Indiana Jones trilogy, and Futurama, among other things. (The last one got us into trouble a few years ago at daycare, when he watched "Jurassic Bark" during breakfast and was upset most of the day.)
I've only restricted his access to a few shows (because OMG Disney Channel, are you TRYING to kill all our brain cells with your inane tween series?), but I explain to him why (with the latest one, I told him flat-out that it's beyond stupid, none of the characters are likable, and I don't want him to think that any of their behavior is acceptable). I also wouldn't let him play the Harry Potter 5-7 Lego so he won't be spoiled for the series before he watches/reads it, but I may let that one go. I really want to show him the LOTR series, but I'm afraid he'll get restless in the slower spots and creeped out by the Nazgul. I'm sure we'll clash more as he gets older.
He loves graphic novels, but so far hasn't tried to bring home anything much about his grade level.
So, um, sorry for expounding at length?
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My sister in law restricts her kids on that basis all the tiiiiime, you are not alone. Though I will go to my grave defending Wizards of Waverly Place because I love that show. Um.
I really think part of the reason I saw some of the movies I did really is because going to the movies was a major form of family entertainment for us, either at the drive in and the regular theater nearly every weekend as a kid.
If you want to give LOTR a shot it might not go badly? I think my kiddo was maybe, I want to say 9 (am too lazy to look it up) when the first movie came out and sat through the whole thing in the theater and enjoyed it (though...I'm not sure he'd have made it through the extended version at the time, heh).
Also, do not apologize, I asked didn't I? :) :) *smoosh*