mommy censorship...

We all take issue with censorship. Whether you are all about making sure that every single persons' freedom of speech is upheld or you are busy trying to make the world a duplicate of your own narrow mind, censorship is an issue... for most.

I am no exception.. though usually I would be on the free speech rah rah side of the matter today I am talking about something a little different... mommy censorship, parental monitoring or no you can't watch that.

K doesn't get to watch a great deal of TV part in thanks to her love of books, dress up, her huge imagination and her love of anything art related... but when she does watch she watches from the TiVo and only really great shows that I find appropriate and have no commercials... so that is where the mommy censorship starts, and I can't think why some one would argue with that tact... When it comes to movies... well we have a problem. She enjoys the Disney movies which are supposed to be appropriate.. I mean after all they are rated G. To me they're awfully inappropriate as they usually involve killing a parent, a parent being dead, orphans, taking the child away from the parents or some other way of undermining the child, or main character's support system. She likes ponies and princesses, bears and other talking animals but what she really likes is adventure, mysticism, magic, super heroes, dragons, frogs (the Muppet kind), aliens and of course... pirates.

I love all those things too so why let her watch all the cartoon Disneyfied horror of loss and sorrow and not let her enjoy the movies that I do that are certainly no less appropriate in subject matter, just in certain visual aspects?

She knows there are movies out there, just our of reach of age appropriate... I am not big on the movie rating system because often it just doesn't work... So as long as I sit and watch every moment of a movie with a heavy thumb on the DVD remote and I've seen it before I don't see why we can't make it work.

This does several things.. some great... some not so much. It allows us to have our weekly "Family Movie Nights" without Mike and I having to watching the same "family films" time and time again and it allows her to develop her imagination and see things she otherwise wouldn't be able to. Lets face it, you can watch fantastic 4 in it's entirety and the only parts not suitable for a 4 year old are the ones with Doom on screen. A lot of superhero movies play out that way. Skip the villains and you're good to go. Knights, Kings, Sorcerers, Dragons and Pirates... they are a little tricky.

Last night we watched Pirates 2. I had already seen it twice so I felt confident in my ability to know which parts to skip for K. The problems: Mike hadn't seen it at all and I found that in this particular movie there was a lot of gray area. So where i wasn't sure how she would react I skipped anyway. All my skipping, pausing and explaining to K made it hard for Mike to follow the story. He didn't know who was on what ship and when and who was dead and blah blah blah... so while he was able to enjoy to comic genius that is the swishy Captain Jack, the beautiful shots on the island and all the other scene by scene goodness he wasn't able to enjoy the movie as a whole.

This is never something that bothers K. She knows that there are parts of movies that aren't okay for her to see, she even knows why and she not only accepts it she appreciates it because she knows she won't have to be scared. We don't think that violence is good for a child to witness... even if they already know it exists...

But by censoring the movie and letting K enjoy the film in it's child friendly fast forward format am I ruining her for great film later?