What is your take on letting your kid watch horror movies?

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That kind of depends on what you considered to be "sheltered." Prior generations didn't grow up watching sex and violence on TV because there was no TV. They weren't exposed to a fantasized version of horror and survival that actually usually has very little to do with the realities of real life horrors. They were exposed to the cycle of life on a more basic level, but they didn't know what really happened in a war unless they were in a war. I think of sheltered as meaning protected from the complexities of adult life. That would mean seeking entertainment designed to scare an adult, pretty much anything having to do with sex, trying to understand the many shades of gray between good and evil, and so on. I think of it as allowing the child to believe war is glorious if that is their wish, to believe in fairies, to love the color pink and ballerinas unabashedly, and so on. To live in a world that they believe they will shape, more than it will shape them. I do think *I* got to grow up more sheltered than my kids will, in many ways. No one had to warn me about drugs when I was in middle school; there were no drugs. And so on. Maybe it was just a temporary anomaly, but my parents felt the same way, and that was living in war torn Europe as kids. Without mass media, kids were generally unaware of anything outside of their immediate experience, and my parents immediate experience involved losing homes and belongings, but not actually seeing anyone blow up.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 26 Oct 2010, 4:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.

He's similar in age to my daughter, I believe? I believe it simply means attractive to them. The tween girl shows all use the term for good looking members of the opposite gender.

Our latest is "screw you." I really tripped over my tongue trying to tell her why I found that offensive, when it is pretty common for people to say things are screwy (as in twisted and turned), and the phrase "screwed up" isn't considered bad (again, clearly twisted and turned). But "screw" as an act with a reference to a person adds a sexual meaning ... She's taking my word for it, but still doesn't get it

I have a different take on it. To me, a kid knowing that their parents disapprove is about as behavior altering as nagging. I don't think it matters at all in most cases. That's like telling your child they can't have sex, then finding out that they did it anyway, but you do nothing and assume that since you've expressed disapproval, it'll just work out. Not to mention the breach of trust that happens when they sneak around. What else aren't they telling you? IMO, trust is paramount.

This leads me back to priorities. As parents, we often find ourselves picking our battles. The battles that we choose to fight tell our kids exactly what our priorities are. In my family, love, respect, and trust top our list. Certain behaviors, like lying, are absolutes. We also spend a lot of time discussing reality from fiction. My kids (well, not the toddler) know that when you throw magic beans out of the window, a giant beanstalk will not really grow. Still, they like to pretend anyway, and that's great - but they know it's pretend. I doubt they are desensitized and they would still be completely amazed if they saw an actual giant beanstalk grow out of magic beans.

Horror films are nothing more than a work of art, even if they are often lame and in bad taste. Again, I must stress that I would not let my young ones watch these films, but in the case of the 10 yo and Final Destnation and sneaking to see it anyway, I feel a pragmatic and flexible approach would have been more appropriate.

I don't buy the Tipper Gore, Marilyn Manson-made-me-do it nonsense. It reminds me of my mom back in the day telling my brother he couldn't listen to Judas Priest because he'd turn into a murderer while in the Mickey D's drive-thru, smoking cigarette after cigarette in the car with the windows rolled up. He's now a wonderful, charitable, and healthy father while she passed away years prematurely from a heart attack caused by unhealthy habits. When it comes to desensitization, I worry more about the families that routinely step over the homeless people than I do about preposterously silly horror flicks. It's just pretend and if your child can't distinguish between pretend and real, then they aren't ready. My son has a remarkable grasp on fact vs. fiction, but my daughter does not. Again, each kid is different which is why I am so opposed to a one-size-fits-all stance on "no." Maybe a child who has a deep interest in horror films could one day grow up to be a sucessful director or forensic scientist. Maybe they're interest in biology is peaked. Probably not, but who knows. If they show signs of disturbance or fear, by all means, turn it off. But not everyone internalizes fictional human suffering. I don't care what The Ring says, no horror movie has ever killed anyone.

Thank you. I like this a lot...we go back and forth on whether we are too strict with my son in many ways, but this is something I have not been able to articulate that I feel strongly about.

My son has never nor will ever see one while I'm alive. He hears screaming and thinks it's real.He cant decipher films drama from reality and I know this from watching a film and having him suddenly appear. He screams with them and asks what happened I am very careful now. Its a fav film genre for me so I have to watch on computer or in another part of the home.

Ugh, I am so upset right now because I wrote a long thought out reply and the boards ate it because it included a link and I am too new to be allowed to post one

Basically, I do understand where you are coming from, but I want to caution you against weighing decades old memories more heavily than actual statistics. Our memories are not the most reliable things, and they also represent a sample size of one. Let me take your “there were no drugs in my middle school” memory as an example. That may very well have been true for you, but if you’ll look up drug trends over time (I can PM you a link to the governmental clearing house on drug stats if you want…I can’t post links yet ) you’ll see from large sample studies done in 2002 that drug use in kids 12-17 has gone way down since the 1970’s, as has drug use in young adults 18-24. Drug use among older individuals has gone up, which may only reflect that people at those older ages are from the 60’s and 70’s when they would have had more exposure to them as children than college kids today did as children.

In other words, you may be unsettled by the knowledge that your child knows more about drugs in middle school than you personally did, but having been born today she has a much lower chance of being an actual drug user than you did. This holds true for almost everything people consider to be social ills, like violence, teen pregnancy, and school drop out rates. If the argument is “kids are exposed to SO MUCH CRAP THESE DAYS” but the conclusion from research is “more exposure does not seem to lead to more kids actually DOING those things, and even correlates to the opposite” then I’m not sure what all the uproar is about.

By “sheltered” I guess I was just using an opinion of my own there, which admittedly doesn’t hold a ton of weight. I hear a lot about how “kids grow up too fast these days” like the only way to properly grow a child is to let them live in a fantastic world of imagination and lack of real world concerns, with this assumption that it actually happened at some point in the past. Having extensively researched childhood throughout history, I can say that I am still unsure when this period of time is supposed to have existed, and even if it did I don’t know if an argument could be made that it was in any way good for society. Kids spend HOURS these days playing when even 70 years ago kids would have been expected to take some actual responsibility around the house to compensate for all the conveniences we have today that make chores take virtually no time at all. 150 years ago they would have been expected to get a job in many cases, even if it was just running errands or working on the family farm. Plus, as you mentioned, there was more real-world exposure to the hard realities of life like death, birth and illness. Sure, they may not have seen fake explosions, or as many sexual situations on TV, but in real life they had more unprotected sex, at younger ages, and committed more acts of violence and bullying at school than kids today do.

It’s almost as if hearing about social ills is worse than actually participating in them to many people. We undoubtedly see and hear about violence and sex much more often now than 50 years ago, but I never hear anyone going on and on about how great the drop in teen pregnancy rates is (other than me) like I hear them going on and on about how “back in the day” kids weren’t “exposed” to stuff as much…as if that is somehow intrinsically bad even if it doesn’t actually link to an increase in those things happening.

Another example of this is the MTV show “16 and Pregnant” which I could honestly care less about, but gets a ton of flak for “glorifying teen pregnancy”. People get so worked up about their teen wearing too much make-up and “trying to grow up too fast” and making these dire predictions about the downfall of society as evidenced by shows like this. I always want to ask if they’d rather their child live in the leave-it-to-beaver times when teen pregnancy was rarely spoken of in mixed company, but happened way more often than it does today. Those pregnant girls would either get married or give the child up in many cases (being as taboo as it was), and I personally feel like this is a true “growing up too soon” situation, not having teens who want to dress like stupid pop stars and watch shows on MTV about sex and babies. I might find it personally unappealing, but I can’t make a case that it leads to any kind of premature loss of innocence, since there is absolutely no evidence of that.

Anyway, I actually love these types of conversations as this is a topic I find very interesting and I hope no one is taking anything personally. I can’t even watch the movie SAW and as of now won’t let my kids anywhere near it or movies like it for the near future, but my personal refusal to allow my kids to watch really traumatic horror movies has nothing to do with the supposed societal decay that just isn’t backed up in fact. Plus, EVERY generation thinks things are going downhill for the new generation...moral decay is one of the oldest tropes. No matter how long our lives get, how good our general health is, how much safer our environment is and no matter how much leisure time we have compared to the past, things are still worse than they were “back in my day”.

"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common." ~ Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts (1979), from an Assyrian clay tablet dating to approximately 2800 BC

I don't think there is any overall moral decay, really, as much as there is more opportunity to "know" of adult matters as a child via media. They get bombarded by it, it seems. More of an unnecessary loss of innocence, if that makes any sense, which makes it sadder.

A couple of thoughts on horror movies:

I believe I read somewhere at some time that struggling with fear is a developmental stage. I certainly observed this in my twin HFA boys who are now almost 18. The stage began with self-direction to reading "scary stories" (Particularly "Scary Stories," "More Scary Stories," that series.) At first they were so terrified they'd slam the book shut, or be afraid to look at the pics. They eventually overcame being this sensitive to their fears. They then wanted to play scary video games, then watch scary movies, with the same process of eventually overcoming their fear level following.

Even assuming that overcoming fear is a necessary developmental stage, of course, that is not to say that horror movies are a naturally-evolved way to do so. But it seems to me that, for boys at least, this may be a kind of rite of passage in our own society.

Because of the range of possible horror movie (or even horror video) experience, however, I did feel, at least when the kids were younger (and I'm talking 13 or 14 in the case of my kids), that their exposure needed to be monitored. Their first experiences of horror movies were on the TV set with me sitting right there watching too (despite the fact that this is still not a genre I enjoy). There were definitely occasions when I grabbed the remote and switched the movie off with the explanation that "this is way too rough." Also when the kids were younger, I tried to avoid movies (as I did video games) that complicated particular issues of their autism--e.g. they tend to repeat incitatory language, so "mature language" was a no-no. In addition, I agree with the numerous posters who distinguish between types, or series, of horror movies. At the earliest stage, I limited the movies to those where the bad/scary characters were "monsters" or "zombies"--something they will never meet in real life. Also note the distinction between the way different movies "feel." The first stage, it seems to me, is those movies that are so unreal and outlandish that adults would tend to laugh at how "camp" they are. Extremely realistic movies with human bad guys (as well as sexual content) are a much more mature level. Finally, all this was accompanied by FREQUENT reminders and lectures on how none of this is real, none of this behavior would be appropriate in real life, and they wouldn't be allowed to watch if I saw the slightest indication that they were emulating any of this behavior in real life. (They can now repeat this lecture back to me.)

Finally, I tend to agree that from an anthropological point of view, exposure to horror fantasy is "natural" for humans. I would cite the really rather horrifying fairy tales for small children, which often have a quite ancient pedigree. I suspect one might find that almost all primitive societies had horror fantasies as part of their oral traditions--perhaps not about zombies or slashers, but certainly about monstrous bears and such.