So What Should Kids Be Able to Watch Anyway?

My son Apel, about a month ago, was peeved by the fact that his classmates had seen The Incredible Hulk and The Dark Knight while he had not. After letting him watch the somewhat violent Iron Man, I figured that I had to go easy on the PG-13 movies thereafter, especially considering that Hulk and Knight kicked up the violence and darkness quotient quite a bit from the relatively "light" Iron Man, the lead character of which blew up terrorists with impunity, all things considered. Since then he and his sister Tala have watched the decidedly more kid-friendly Kung Fu Panda and WALL-E, both perfectly safe kid's fare.

Now, as my daughter is all of three-and-a-half years old and is not particularly keen on superhero or action movies anyway, she's not so much a question mark as my son who is six and will, next year, be seven, is.

By the time I was his age, I had seen Luke Skywalker's hand chopped off by Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, a de-powered Superman get beaten bloody in Superman II, and all but the most gruesome violence in Raiders of the Lost Ark (my parents covered my eyes during the part where the Nazis were melted by the Ark of the Covenant's awesome power). The last time I checked, I'm not what one would consider a homicidal maniac.

I've skimmed through some internet sites on what's "developmentally appropriate" for children of my son's age and get varying results, though gratuitous sex and violence are obviously red flags all around. Violence, though, is a little more of an enigma as it's sometimes hard to draw the line between acceptable "cartoon" violence and the more serious kind. Arguably, "cartoon" violence is even worse because it doesn't illustrate for the child how bad the effects of violence can be on a person. I read somewhere how the Home Alone movies are worse for children than a lot of action movies because of the sheer amount of brutality to which the child protagonist subjects his adversaries.

And then there's the question of language, which now involves Tala because a lot of the shows she watches on TV when we're not around are not as easy to police as the movies she gets to watch, which we control. We don't like hearing our kids say "stupid," or "moron" or "idiot" in addition to all of the other, more traditionally abhorred, four-letter swear words, but unfortunately they're integrated into the dialogue of a lot of the shows they like to watch, like Spongebob Squarepants and a host of other shows on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. Tala loves Disney movies so we expose her to a lot of those (her favorites thus far being Cinderella, and Lady and the Tramp).

I'm glad my kids are into lots of other things besides rotting their brains in front of a TV, but I accept that every now and then they can watch. The problem is that policing what they do watch can be pretty tricky, especially as I haven't figured out how to lock channels.