Parental Nazism

[ciroccoj]

tobiascharity, it begins real early. The urge to solve problems through parental Nazi-ism.

Chris and I have been in debates for a while about Buzz Lightyear and Star Command in our home. When Daniel was little, we pre-viewed everything he saw, including Disney movies, because there's some scary shit out there (if you don't believe me, check out the last few minutes of The Little Mermaid, and tell me that spearing the giant sea-witch through the stomach with a big bloody boat, then watching her turn into a skeleton in her death throes, isn't scary shit).

Anyway. Somewhere along the way we stopped pre-watching everything, but still tried as much as possible to keep things nonviolent, non-commercial. TVO Kids instead of Fox Kids. Magic Schoolbus instead of He-Man.

Then Daniel started visiting other kids and watching Spider Man and playing shoot-em-up Nintendo at their houses. And we went over the whole "different houses have different rules" credo to (a) reassure Daniel that other kids' parents weren't evil for letting their kids watch such things, (b) he could watch them at their houses, and (c) that didn't mean he could watch them in our house.

But somewhere, we kind of lost sight of that. Witness the fact that at one point I found that we were not only letting Daniel (and Justin) watch Buzz Lightyear in our home, but that Chris had taped a whole bunch of episodes for him so that he could watch it whenever he liked.

Now, Buzz Lightyear is not evil. In fact, it's a pretty good program, where good triumphs, nobody gets killed, there's strong female characters, and a whole bunch of other nice stuff happens. But it's still violent - lasers and blowing things up and all sorts of stuff like that. And the fact that nobody gets hurt or killed... well... I'm ambivalent about that. I'm not sure I want my kid to watch, over and over, material that implies that the way to win arguments is with violence - but that's OK because nobody gets hurt anyway.

And it disturbs the hell out of me to hear my little darlings chasing each other around our home and yelling, over and over again, "You're DEAD ZURG!!! I'll SHOOT YOU!!!" ::sound of lasers and bombs and other instruments of destruction::

My point (and I do have one) is that finally Chris and I came to the conclusion that it wasn't appropriate to have this tape in our home. And that Chris would explain it to Daniel, let him watch it one last time, then put it away until he's 8.

OK. No problem. Daniel was a little upset, but on the whole took it rather well. He can still watch it at other people's houses, and it's not gone forever. Just until he (and Justin) are a little less prone to copy the TV in their games, and whack the hell out of each other by accident when they get a little too enthused.

So I go to pick him up from his babysitter's today. And what do I hear as we're leaving? Daniel whispering to her, "So I'll watch Buzz tomorrow. You'll tape it for me, right?"

Poor kid. This is not what I wanted him to do - make him think that he has to go sneaking around in order to get something he wants. I guess we'll have to have the whole "different houses have different rules" talk again tonight after he comes back from his friends' house. And add in a dose of "if you don't like the rules we have, please try to talk to us about them, don't sneak around behind our backs trying to get around them."