Parental Misguidance

Last Saturday night, my 10-year-old Gabby went to a friend’s house for a sleepover. At about 8 pm, I saw an incoming call from the friend’s mother. Uh oh. Is it the puke virus? The flu?

   

“Hey,” the mom asked me, who happens to also be a friend of mine, “the girls want to watch ‘Pitch Perfect.’ The preview doesn’t really look that appropriate, but Gabby said she’s seen it already, so I figure you’ve seen it and that it’s totally fine.”

“Um. Well, yeah,” I started stuttering, “yes, Gabby has seen it, but I actually haven’t.” I didn’t tell her that I didn’t even watch the preview, and that I had just let her watch it since another friend told me she had allowed her kids to see it. I also didn’t tell her that not only had Gabby seen it, but so had Gabby’s younger sisters, ages 8, 7 and 4. The twins have not seen it yet. 

 

The fact is I was busted. Outed as a mom who clearly does not carefully preview the movies and TV selections that her children watch.

I used to be better. When Gabby was 3, even 4, she was watching all the typical preschool programming—“the Wiggles” (are they around still?), “Dora,” “Blue’s Clues,” “Barney,” you name it. Six years later, my now four-year-old Lily would laugh at those shows and say they’re “for babies.” Actually she’d say they’re “faw babies.” She prefers shows like “H2O,” “iCarly,” “Ant Farm,” and even some reality TV programming like “Dance Moms” and “Cake Boss.”

This is what happens between child number 1 and child number 4. We become more lax as parents, and our younger children get exposed sooner to the things we never would have shown our first.  It’s always funny when Lily, our four year old, has a playdate with a child who is an oldest and asks her friend if he or she would like to watch “Victorious” or “True Jackson VP”.  On a recent playdate, I tried to convince Lily and her friend to watch the “Smurfs” movie, but Lily looked at me in shock and said, “hey, this doesn’t have real people.” It’s been two years since she’s seen animation. Even my twins seem to have quickly outgrown Baby Einstein, and are already obsessed with “Yo Gabba Gabba” and “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.” Yes, they’re very advanced.

Obviously, these changes are my fault, or my husband’s fault. Truth is, I could argue he is more to blame, because he seems to enjoy these shows as much as my girls do. Sunday mornings when all my kids sit around in a TV coma, he is sitting right there with them, holding Barron’s but not actually reading it, laughing at Gibby in “iCarly,” or as entranced in an episode of “Good Luck Charlie” “Austin and Ally” or “Big Time Rush” as my kids are. You know the trance—no one seems to hear anything I’m saying and I have to repeat my questions or commands five times before anyone actually responds.

The fact is with TV shows my husband and I tend to scan an episode or two before allowing our kids to watch. And there are a few we have put on an off-limits list. Shows like “Homeland” and “Californication.” No, seriously, we don’t let them watch “House of Anubis” either. I’m sure there are others, I just can’t think of them right now.    

But movies are harder to monitor for some reason. When I was a child and my parents went out on a Saturday night, a movie was something we had to go to a video store to rent. Today, movies are a click away. Between DVR, Netflix, Apple TV, my children are constantly “searching” for movies, spending hours scanning the selections as if they might uncover some unknown masterpiece of tween cinema. 

And the truth is, it’s hard to know what is appropriate or not. I had encouraged them to watch the movie “Big” but my seven year old told me the next day it really wasn’t appropriate for them. You know you’re doing a great job when your child has to tell you that the movie you selected really wasn’t appropriate for young children. I said, “What do you mean? ‘Big’ is the kind of movie you should be watching.” And then they replayed for me a scene I had forgotten about when Tom Hanks discovers or should I say uncovers the bra of his co-star during a slow dance.

“Don’t worry mom,” my seven-year-old Sophie reassured me. “We covered Lily’s eyes.”

I had a similar experience with the movie “Overboard”—a movie I had loved as a child. I bought it for my kids for a long car trip we had last year, and, you know how it is in the car, our kids are watching what we in the front seats can only hear. Well, I heard one character asking his wife “why she’s not in the mood tonight? Does she have her period?”—“What’s a period mom?” Sophie asked. I heard another character discussing a young boy who likes to look at pornographic magazines in the bathroom. And another scene where a pair of women’s lace underwear are found in the dashboard of a car. That was a good parenting moment.

And one last bust—and perhaps the biggest in recent memory-- was “Look Who’s Talking.” Again, I remembered it as a cute kids movie. In fact, we decided to all watch it together for a family movie night. From the very first scene—which clearly I had forgotten about—when we watch a pool of sperm swim towards and penetrate an egg, Rob and I spent the majority of the movie answering a lot of questions. “What are those fish?” What are they trying to squeeze into?” “Hey I thought you had to be married to have a baby”? and “How can you be married to one person but have a baby with another person?”

All Rob said to me was, “thank God you were the one who suggested that movie. If I had suggested it, you would not be speaking to me right now.” Correct.

Thankfully there are some helpful tips and websites for parents like me—sites like Commonsensemedia.org for those parents without any real common sense for these things. And in fact it came in handy for me a few months ago when one of my daughters coerced me into the most dreaded parenting event of all time, the “sleepover party,” and where in what seemed like a cute idea she wished to watch the move “Sleepover.” (If you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry. It was not nominated for any Oscars.) I had said no to the movie “Sleepover” a few times because I really didn’t know anything about it—see, I told you there was a time I was better, maybe, come to think of it, it was right before I had children 5 and 6. And then the begging started. The whining that “So and so has seen it, and this one’s seen it, and this one saw it at this one’s house,” you know the drill. Your child convinces you that every other kid in the world has seen it, and you are the one, and only one outlying villainous mother. What can I say? I caved. I said fine. That, and it was rated PG, so I figured how bad could it be?

Luckily I spoke to my sister that night moments before I was about to begin the movie, and she told me about commonsensemedia.org. Here’s what I read, as a roomful of girls sat in the dark, munching on popcorn and waiting for me to press play.

Parents need to know that this movie is filled with the kind of parental concerns that aren't factored into the MPAA's rating system. The main characters -- young teenage girls -- sneak out of the house after promising not to. They make a date with a man they met on the Internet with the plan of getting him to buy one of them a drink. They then sneak into a club and drink alcohol. One girl secretly watches a boy undress (from the rear, nudity off screen). They vandalize property, imprison a security guard, drive without licenses, make an overweight girl feel bad about herself. Many characters lie, including adults. One of the girls loses a boyfriend by refusing to "hook up" with him but apparently brags to her friends that she did. There is also some bathroom humor and intrusive product placement.

Sounds perfect for an 8 year old. (Don’t worry, I didn’t show it. I had to bribe the hell out of my daughter afterwards, but I did hold my ground. )

The website also gives parents a scale for measuring “positive messages” “positive role models” sexual content, violence, drug abuse, bad language and consumerism. “Sleepover” scored a 0 for positive messages and positive role models, but racked up three stars for sex and drugs and alcohol.

I know that access to media is at my children’s fingertips, and that every day, some new show, or movie, or app, or digital form of communication is popping up. There’s no question, as parents it is hard to stay on top of it all, hard to know what is ok, what is a little advanced but essentially harmless, what is completely out of whack.

The good news is, according to commensensemedia.org, “Pitch Perfect” scores four points (out of 5) for positive messages and three for positive role models. See, I knew what I was doing when I let 4-year-old Lily watch it, even though it’s rated PG-13, and she now runs around calling everyone “Fat Amy.”