Howefitz Blog

Calli, my two year old daughter helps us demonstrate: Who should she emulate? The strange visitor from another planet who solves most of his problems with his fists? ...Or...

There has been an ongoing debate in our house about what type of movies/television is okay to expose our two year old to. Since we already have a fifteen year old in the house, and I being an animation/children’s entertainment fan anyway, we have plenty of DVDs to choose from in our library.

The main topic up for debate: Super Heroes or Disney?

I’ve blogged previously about Batman and kids in my post ‘Batman Deserves Your Respect‘. Here I want to attack this topic from a slightly different angle.

Super Hero shows feature a lot of violence. Mainly of the kicking and punching variety. The trouble with people who are in their terrific twos is that they like to repeat and mimic everything they see and hear. Which, predictably, leads to the attack toddler that punches and kicks us.
So, of course, that leads us to believe that it possibly isn’t such a great idea to expose the rugrat to a lot of super heroic adventures just yet. Even though I’m pretty choosey about which episodes she watches, the punching  and kicking is pretty much unavoidable. Daddy will probably have to wait a little bit longer to school that girl on the finer points of the four-color American mythology.

Generally, her little attention span will allow her to watch Disney movies. But what’s this? At the end of nearly every Disney film is a villain who meets a gruesome end. PLUS, I dare you to name a Disney film where the child character begins the film in the company of both parents, and both parents survive to the credits. Let’s think about this together, shall we?

(cue final Jeopardy music)

Without the benefit of IMDB, I thought of Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, Pinocchio (I’m starting to stretch here: if Geppeto is Pinocchio’s father, and the Blue Fairy the mother…), and, um, yeah…

Let’s think of some villains. Go all the way back: Snow White‘s wicked stepmother is smashed by a boulder after plummeting off of a cliff. Ursula explodes into little bits in The Little Mermaid. Clayton is hung by vines in Tarzan. Gaston, after mortally wounding the Beast, falls off of the enchanted castle to his doom in Beauty and the Beast. Scar is devoured by the hyenas in The Lion King. I’m sure I don’t need to go on.

So which is better? Bruising and beating your villains and locking them up until they escape to fight another day? Or, once we declare someone as ‘evil’ it’s perfectly okay to dispatch them in any way we seem to see fit. No trial, no
jury. No questions asked. Cue the happy music, leave any guilt at the happily ever after.

Which do you prefer?

I believe this is a matter of personal preference, as well as a matter of being engaged with your child. You have to pay attention. Know what your child responds to, and how he/she will respond. For us, I have a deep love of the comic book medium, and super heroes come with the territory. I wear a Spider-Man coat in the winter and every t-shirt I own features some comic character or another. So, naturally, I want to share this world with my kid.
There’s good stuff in there. Spider-Man teaches us that with great power comes great responsibility. Superman shows that we should use our special talents and abilities for the greater good, not necessarily to achieve our own agendas. Professor Xavier of the X-Men says that any dream worth having is a dream worth fighting for. And the list goes on…

We have learned that watching the kicking and the punching leads to kicking and punching within our home. So I have to be very careful what I expose my little angel to. I’ve concluded that I’ve got to ease her in to this. Krypto the Super Dog is great. X-Men:Evolution still has some punching and kicking,
but it’s more creative use of powers than anything else, which for some reason, doesn’t seem as offensive. I just discovered Marvel‘s SuperHero Squad comics and marvelkids.com. These are fantastic tools to explain the characters that Daddy wears on a daily basis without the punching and kicking! Excelsior!

As for Disney? Can you imagine a childhood without America’s favorite animated fairy tales? I know as I was growing up, I didn’t realize that these stories were about parent-less villain-killers. I just knew that good triumphed over evil, and the world was a better place for it. Is there anything truly wrong with that? Calli responds well to these stories, and I wouldn’t dream of taking that away from her.

...The Princess who knows that someday her prince will come and may inadvertantly murder the villian in her life?

What do you think?

Do you remember stories from your childhood that you read/watch now and think: ‘They let me watch this as a kid?’ Do you think it effected you in a negative way?

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