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For all the "think of the children" commentators here and in the blog - why is it that kids who have parents that hide them from everything "bad", wind up so me
by powertower 12y ago
For all the "think of the children" commentators here and in the blog - why is it that kids who have parents that hide them from everything "bad", wind up so messed up, narcissistic, and are generally unable to cope with life?
The answer is of course right there, by putting them in a "safe place" you've removed every adversary and every challenge - right when the mind needs those things the most so it can form abilities necessary to deal with and move forward in life (a life that will throw all kinds of issues, disasters, and curve balls at you).
Its kind of like the peanut allergy study that was posted here a day or two ago... The infants and children that don't get exposed to peanuts at an early age - so their systems can get familiar and use to it, are most likely to end up in the highly allergic group. [this is just an analogy]
edit:
This isn't about movies (that word is not mentioned in my post). Some of the replies so far are red-herrings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring).
I'm not suggesting that children should be constantly exposed (or made to watch) graphic and horror movies to prepare them for life.
And I'm sure there are cases of children who just can't handle these things at the age of 10-15... Though most will be fine - and won't need therapy, will not have their lives ruined, nor will their well-beings be negatively impacted.
I am also not suggesting that they should have no supervision.
What I am suggesting is that there are too many over-protective and helicopter parents who are making "special children" that can only live and function inside bubbles.
And if the child get's broken by watching "Aliens" at the age of 11, then the problem is with the parenting - rather than the friend's dad who let them watch it.
In which case, please, attach a note to the child with all the rather available things that he/she should not be exposed to or is allergic to (like peanut butter).
We live in a society where a child would have to sit on a park bench for 700,000 years before he/she would get kidnapped, but if you leave him/her in a car to pay the gas station clerk, someone can take a picture of that child being untended and send it to the police, which will then charge you with a misdemeanor.
- kyberias 12y agoWow, what a wildly ignorant comment.
- sanderjd 12y agoCould you expand on this? As someone with no kids yet, your parent's comment resonated with me as I often feel that kids are being shielded far more than I recall from my childhood, to their detriment, but I'd love to see it from the other side.
- facepalm 12y agoWell, provide any data at all? What percentage of kids that are being shielded from stuff end up being messed up? And what does it even mean - do you mean kids should not be protected from anything at all? Or what, specifically, should they not be protected from?
- sanderjd 12y agoAh, gotcha, if by "ignorant" it was meant "unsupported and unspecific" then I certainly see that point.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- angersock 12y agoI saw Event Horizon when I was like ten or eleven. I saw IT when I was about the same age. I used to stay up and watch old reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents with my dad. ...I'm not convinced that that was a good thing.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoI'll grant you Event Horizon (I haven't seen the other too). I was scared shitless for a long time after this movie.
- angersock 12y agoOn the plus side, it kind of planted the seeds of insanity required for my current career doing web development in enterprise healthcare. Where we're going, we won't need modern practices.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoYeah. I think I'm gonna rewatch it soon as I've been tasked to bolt on WSDL support to a REST API app just because the top can save some money on an outsourced mobile app, whose developers have automated class generators for WSDL... Libera te tutemet ex inferis...
- scarygliders 12y agoA bit offtopic but relevant to your post: When I was an SGI customer support engineer, I repaired an SGI system for one of the film video production companies in SOHO in London - one of the SGI's was being used to render a scene in Event Horizon in which a fire extinguisher was being blown past the camera by an explosion. Loved the movie when it came out.
- benjohnson 12y agoIn my parental opinion, there's more meaningful adversity for parents to give their children than terrifying movies. For my own childhood, a diet of passive and disjointed media led to learned helplessness. My own children are forced to hike adult distances and work hard on tasks they find unpleasant. Hopefully this will lead to strength in the face of adversity.
- ChrisPebble 12y ago> there's more meaningful adversity for parents to give their children than terrifying movies I grew up in a (relatively) rough part Chicago and in spite or because of the depressed nature of the place never saw a lot of horror movies growing up. Now working with a lot of people who grew up and live in suburbia on a steady diet of horror movies, I am amazed at the amount of fear and anxiety they demonstrate when dealing with anything vaguely paranormal or the thought of an intruder. I know numerous people who sleep with a gun under their pillow even though statistically crime (especially violent crime) is stunningly low in the places we now live. They take precautions I never even considered growing up even though break-ins and muggings happened regularly in the neighborhood. This is 100% idle conjecture on my part, but I always wondered if horror movies played some part in such behavior.
- Crito 12y agoI've got to say, I've never actually met anybody that admitted to taking paranormal nonsense seriously. People understand that "Freddy" isn't real, and that kind of slasher-fic is not why people own guns for home defense.
- anigbrowl 12y agoOf course they know the stuff on screen isn't real. It's what it symbolizes that they're scared of.
- Crito 12y agoIsn't that the point of a horror movie though? The audience is supposed to know that it isn't real, and are supposed to be scared of what it symbolizes. If kids aren't scared by Aliens, then the movie failed. Being scared by Aliens even though they know it isn't real doesn't mean that the movie inappropriate for them, it means that they are handling the movie as adults do.
- baby 12y agoMy uncle back when I was really young showed me and my cousin "Full Metal Jacket". I still remember some scenes, the film traumatized me, literally. I don't know what age I was but I was way too young for that. Kids can get terrified by horror and violence. Sex? Not so much. I don't understand why we hide nudity from kids.
- omnibrain 12y agoI got "traumatized" by Baywatch (something with a ghost on the beach) and the short (2-4 sentences) teaser texts of mystery/horror-books in a book catalogue (with very broad sortiment) that came to our house. On the other hand I coped well with Mad Max and Missing in Action. You just can't predict what hits.
- stcredzero 12y agoI don't understand why we hide nudity from kids. Because we are afraid of harming them, because we are conditioned to be afraid of ourselves. !Kung Bushmen often lived in hand-made temporary huts. Therefore it was basically normal for couples to make love in front of the kids. !Kung Bushmen brides were also once prized by neighboring agricultural people, as they were thought to be particularly uninhibited and enthusiastic sexually. The US is still very much a puritan culture in some weirdly sublimed ways.
- leppr 12y agoMore than the simple fact of whether the child has access to 'adult' material or not, what's important is how it's presented to them. Whether they see a film with friends who got a copy from another friend, or whether their parents actually show it to them makes a big difference in how they analyze what they see. So not putting your child in a bubble and not wanting to show them disturbing media aren't mutually exclusive at all.
- CamperBob2 12y agoI tend to agree. The biggest problem I have is that movie ratings for all practical purposes carry the force of law even here in the US, despite the lack of anything resembling valid evidence of harm that kids under 16 or 17 might undergo by exposure to a movie. The Germans in particular are ridiculously overprotective in this sense. Um, guys, I'm pretty sure Hitler never saw Aliens. Lighten up already. The second, more serious criticism I have is that the moral panic associated with exposure to children to onscreen violence, sex, and drugs can only diminish the real outrage that we ought to feel when kids in war-torn countries, inner-city slums, and refugee zones actually experience real-life violence and horror beyond anything Hollywood can conjure, and on a daily basis. If most of those kids don't grow up to be serial killers, I somehow doubt a movie is going to do it.
- acdha 12y ago> If most of those kids don't grow up to be serial killers, I somehow doubt a movie is going to do it. 1. Anyone in those conditions isn't seeing violence glorified the way it is in movies, where the guys you were rooting for win at the end and you rarely see prolonged consequences. Someone in a refugee camp knows all too well that the bad guys can leave people broken and pay no consequences for it. 2. Perhaps not serial killers out of a horror film but it's not like the concept of cycles of violence is unknown: children who grow up in horrible conditions do have a higher rate of either becoming gang/cartel/etc. members, soldiers, etc.[1] or have escalated rates of suicide, domestic violence, substance abuse, etc. because they've never recovered from what happened. 1. either because they have no choice or because they're all too familiar with what happens when you don't represent enough of a threat to deter violence. Closer to home, This American Life had a great interview with kids talking about how they had to join gangs because they'd be getting attacked either way so it was a question of either being afraid to leave your house or having enough allies to be relatively safe most days: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/harper-high-school-part-one?act=1 http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/h...
- DanBC 12y ago> If most of those kids don't grow up to be serial killers, I somehow doubt a movie is going to do it. That's not why most people want to restrict the amount of violent content their children watch. See, for example, the "You've been Tango'd" ads in the UK. There's a soda called "Tango". One advert showed someone drinking the can, than a fat near naked man painted orage runs in, and slaps the drinker's face with both hands. Children imitated this, causing several perforated eardrums. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Man_%28advertisement%29 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Man_%28advertisement%2... (see controversy section). That's one example of children imitating what they saw on tv, and other children being harmed as a result. EDIT: i'm not saying children copy everything. But this example proves that children do imitate some behaviours; that children are influenced by some things they watch. Ask any parent about the children's show "Caillou" and the change of their children into whiners. Parents realise that some content will cause mild behaviour changes or nightmares and they want to be prepared.
- stcredzero 12y agowhy is it that kids who have parents that hide them from everything "bad", wind up so messed up, narcissistic, and are generally unable to cope with life? Precisely because! As the Japanese say, "You only know true kindness through suffering."
- 72deluxe 12y agoWhat a strange expression. Does this mean to truly appreciate how good my car is I must drive it into a tree and wreck it?
- pluma 12y agoI think it's more along the lines of "to truly appreciate how good your car is you must drive one that is a lot worse".
- stcredzero 12y agoNo. I'm thinking more along the lines of stuff that happened to members of my family and their friends in Korea under the Japanese occupation. Yours is indeed a first world perspective. To borrow your phrase: "To truly appreciate how good your life is, you must first 'drive' one that is a lot worse."
- stcredzero 12y agoIf you drove your car into a tree and became paralyzed, you might become much kinder from a firsthand understanding of deep suffering. (You might also become angry and bitter. You might even do both these things at the same time!)
- pluma 12y agoStrawman much? I didn't argue for complete prohibition. That's silly, even if it seems to be popular in some parts of the world (e.g. state-sponsored sexual abstinence programs in the US).