Protecting children

There was a scene in one of the books - I think Leaving Glorytown - where the adults are not in agreement about how much information to give the children. They end up being open because a lack of information can be very dangerous, and any attempts to hide things are getting more and more likely to fail.

It reminded me of some different entertainment issues.

One was an editorial from a woman with small children who was complaining about the darkness of children's movies, like Mufasa's death in The Lion King. Her idea of appropriate peril would be a witch threatening to cast a spell so that there were never cupcakes again.

It also reminded me of a forum discussion once marveling at how dark Little House on the Prairie was for a family TV show. You know, like with that illiterate preacher woman trying to turn the townspeople against Mary when she was substitute teaching for them, or when that guy from The Dirty Dozen put on a clown mask and raped Sylvia.

Going a little further down the rabbit hole, I remember people marveling over how My Neighbor Totoro had no villains. It didn't seem like such a big deal to me at first, but that is pretty unusual, and it is special.

Even with no villains, your mother can be sick, and you can miss her a lot, and you can get lost. There is danger there, even without villains.

This world has villains.

So in Cuba there were teachers who might not excuse a child to go to the bathroom until he soiled himself, and grade him down on tests even when he got the answers right, and allow other students to beat him up because his parents were worms who wanted to leave the country instead of joining the party. In Cambodia  there were children who were also called names while doing forced labor to the point of exhaustion, losing family members to illness and starvation and execution along the way.

In both countries there was often a lack of food and medicine.

In my country, homelessness happens, and violence and abuse and hunger happen, even to children.

Well, saying these things "happen" misses something, in that there are reasons they happens, and people behind those reasons. It's important to remember that.

Illness also happens, and though less obvious there are often human factors in that. There are some very human factors to the measles currently going around.

Here's the thing: is it more important to work on protecting children from entertainment, or to protect them from violence and lack of necessities?

It seems like a pretty obvious answer, but I think a lot of people find the larger problems intractable, while censorship is very doable. As dishonest as it is to portray a world where these bad things don't happen, many will settle for that if they think those things won't touch their children.

Obviously there is a need to consider the level of information that children are getting, and the manner in which they are getting it. I was scarred at a young age by The Dirty Dozen playing on television (along with several Clint Eastwood movies). My father probably could have been more responsible there.

(Also, I guess I have an issue with Richard Jaeckel.)

One more tangent: there was an article recently about adults missing the point of Mr. Rogers' advice to "look for the helpers". When children see the bad things in the world, one reasonable way of helping them deal with that is pointing out that we don't just let the bad things happen, we do things to make them better. That should be the job of adults.

A focus on the superficial will never work. Helpers need to be grounded in reality. Also, they need care more about that then the appearance. That is better for both adults and children.