You let her watch WHAT??!!

Catherine on kids and movies:

"My eldest child has had an obsessive fear of sharks ever since my brother introduced her, at 4, to Jaws. It is so severe that I do even attempt to argue against her concerns, even in fresh water."

My parents would not let me watch Jaws until I was a teenager, which always struck me as weird since they took me to Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was nine. (Although my father might have thought better of it had he known beforehand about all the facial-explosions at the film's climax.) I don't recall too much other stuff about their parental concerns back then, since my film tastes as a kid were pretty tame. I was never all that interested in going to R-movies just because they were R-movies, and they occasionally took me if I asked. I wanted to see Bladerunner merely because Harrison Ford was in it (this was when Ford was starting to become the Coolest Thing Ever), and both my mother and I ended up hating that movie, not because it was violent, but because it was boring. (I still think so, by the way. I've watched Bladerunner a few times since then, and I still always find it nice to look at for a few minutes but then dull-as-ditchwater.)

So, what questionable decisions have I made with The Daughter, in terms of movies? Well, a year ago I watched Titanic while in the room with her. She was playing a computer game at the time, so I didn't think much of it, especially when she interpreted the parts when the ship's stern is tilting up into the air and people are sliding down the length of the ship in terms of the slides at the playground. And then, a day or two later, The Wife went to give the Daughter a bath...and that's when the paralyzing fear of water hit with full force. It took us about two months to get over that. So, I think I'll be keeping Jaws out of her eyes for at least a few more years. And, just to be safe, I'll do likewise with The Abyss. You can't be too careful with those water movies, you know.

The Daughter has also seen the first two Lord of the Rings movies. I generally skip past the really violent parts, but in general I find the violence in those films to be of an almost cartoonish variety. When I get the Return of the King DVD, though, I do plan to skip past some of the opening "warping of Smeagol" stuff -- especially that tight closeup of his rotting teeth as he sinks them into a raw fish. Strangely, her favorite part of the LOTR movies is the very opening of The Two Towers. She just loves the way Gandalf falls into "the hole", and then he catches his sword and starts beating up the big mean monster. All this, of course, both appeals to me (on the basis that I'm raising her with a delightfully warped sense of humor) and appalls me (on pretty much the same grounds). Plus, well -- the water movies seem to offer more in terms of a "real-world" scare. There aren't any orcs in the world these days.

Of course, there are the Star Wars movies, all of which she's seen. I don't find much objectionable at all in those, although my original intent to take her to see Attack of the Clones in the theater was quashed when I realized she'd likely have nightmares if she saw the execution scene, when the three big-ass beasties come out of their cages, on the big screen with their shrieks in blaring digital sound. But then, that scene is her favorite part of the DVD, so either I was overly protective, or the TV tends to reduce stuff like that to a less frightening stature. Anyway, when Padme swings down on the chain and kicks the "mean kitty" (that's what The Daughter calls that particular monster), well, for her that's the biggest laugh in the movie.

In general, my approach to film selection seems to be more skewed to trying to keep The Daughter from watching bad movies than from watching ones that are too violent. It seems to me that a good movie with content a bit beyond her age level is less likely to undermine what I'm trying to accomplish, as a parent, than a crappy movie is. I'd rather her watch the Helm's Deep sequence of The Two Towers now than, say, From Justin to Kelly at any age.

(BTW, Catherine's oldest is apparently going to prom. I applaud Catherine's sense of appropriate prom-attire, but all the same, when it comes time for my daughter to be thinking of such things, I hope she doesn't mind wearing a dress that hermetically seals in the back. And the fact that I'll be in the limo too. With a gun. And five boxes of bullets. And I don't even own a gun presently. It seems to me they should just rent guns out to fathers on prom night.)