To See or Not to See

We had lunch and a playdate with our friends today. While some of the little boys were running around with toy guns and swords, the moms started talking about how children pick up up on some of the scary things in the world even though we try to shelter them from it. For example, we've never let Nicholas watch a Batman movie or ever even talked about Batman in the house yet he knows all about him. Nicholas insisted on having a Batman-themed birthday party, selected Batman underwear at the store and loves to wear his Batman pajamas. When he is getting dressed in his Batman pajamas, he likes to say, "I'm becoming Batman right before your eyes!" Anyway, it's great that he likes super heroes. Nothing wrong with that. However, if there are super heroes then you must have "bad guys" and that combination will always result in fighting and violence of some kind. We try to let him watch only good-natured kid's shows like Go, Diego, Go! or The Backyardigans. However, between the shows he is bombarded with commercials for who knows what. It makes me want to unplug the TV completely until he is much older.

Recently I took Nicholas to a movie at Studio Movie Grill. It's a really cool theater concept in which you can eat a meal while watching a movie. I had steak quesadillas and Nicholas had chicken strips. Nicholas loved the novelty of it and the food was actually pretty good. We saw a G-rated movie called "Wallace and Gromit". It seemed like a cute claymation-style movie with a story line about a British town dealing with an overpopulation of rabbits eating from the people's vegetable gardens. Wallace and Gromit are hired to get rid of the rabbits. But Wallace ends up turning into a giant were-rabbit with a voracious appetite for vegetables but then later is saved from his "were-rabbit-ness" by his trusty side-kick. Sounds rather harmless to me...and I like the idea of encouraging the consumption of vegetables in any form!

According to the Motion Picture Association of America, a G-rating means that the movie is intended for all ages and "contains nothing in theme, language, nudity and sex, violence, etc. that would, in the view of the Rating Board, be offensive to parents whose younger children view the film." I was very disappointed in "Wallace and Gromit" and I do not feel that it should be rated G. Besides having some rather scary looking characters in it, I recall lots of chases, people getting hit, an explosion and the phrase "blithering idiot", along with several other phrases I would have prefered that Nicholas had not heard. Fortunately, Nicholas had so much fun eating while watching that I was able to distract him a lot with the food part of the experience and we ended up leaving the movie early so he really didn't see much of it. Some friends of ours had a similar experience at another G-rated movie called "Ratatouille". It was more violent than it needed to be (there were a lot of knives being thrown around in one particular scene) and the language was, again, inappropriate for young children. One of the children was so upset that she had leave. What was Disney thinking?

I now realize that I can't assume that I can take Nicholas to a movie simply based on the fact that it has a G-rating. I looked into the MPA rating system and found the following description for G rated movies "Some snippets of language may go beyond polite conversation but they are common everyday expressions. The violence is at a minimum." This is very subjective criteria, to say the least. I don't think that the people who decide on these ratings have heard the "common everday expressions" used in our household because they would have never heard the phrase "blithering idiot"! And what does "violence is at a minimum" mean anyway? There doesn't need to be any violence at all in a movie that a three-year old child is watching.

I'm not alone in my concern over these ratings. A recent study in Pediatrics found that parents felt that only 50% of G-rather movies were appropriate for their 3-7 year old children. So much for intended for "all ages".