• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

violence vs. sex & children

wait

I'm not syaing the movie shouldn't be made. But I am saying young kids don't need to be seeing it even if they want to. (young to me is pretty much any age under 12 to 14 years)

I'll take the tag "over protective", and I'll thank you for it. I also believe you might change your mind a bit when you have children of your own.

I don't expose my kids to the harsh realities of life very often at all. I believe children are the purest, most innocent, care free, truthful, loving things on the planet. Why would I want to change that before it's neccessary? Why do they need to know about the cruelty of man and nature before I think they are ready to handle it?

It is more than o.k. to tell a child "no". It is something that's needed more in this world. Kids need boundries, and guidelines.

I do think we're quite nuts over the human body in America. But I'm also not ready to walk my 12 year old duaghter down the streets of Amsterdam's red light district.
 
Motokid said:
Novella: I was talking about Scarface the movie with Al Pacino. There would not be any commercials. Just a couple hours of the "F" word and intense violence. Great representation of drug wars, and life of drugs, but not something kids really need access to is it?

Be happy your child is not wanting to be older than they are. Unfortunately other parents let their kids do as they please. My child believes she's missing something really great because of the way other kids talk. She wants access to things I'm not ready to give, and I don't believe she's ready to handle.
Click to expand...


Geesh, Moto, I know the deal. Tony in the white suit with the powder all over his face. Staircase scene. I've seen it. I did bad things in 1983, too. They show it on TV all the time--with commercials.

My son is older than 14 in many ways. He's certainly not immature.

He's really serious about his music, likes to have intense conversations about esoteric things, shuns crap food as garbage . . .

Being into pornography and voilence is not a sign of maturity. Do you think it is? Do you think those things are "for grown-ups"? I don't. I think they're for passive assholes who get a vicarious thrill out of other people's pain.

Am I clear? Doesn't matter what age you are.

Further to that thought, if you tell your kids that they can't watch violence, pornography, and purient crap talk shows because they "aren't old enough" and "that's for adults" and they can when they reach some magical age, you're just setting them up for doing exactly that.

Rather than say, "you're not old enough", why not say, "that's total crap, don't waste your time." And then be prepared to tell them WHY its total crap, what the message of that medium is, and why it's self-destructive to spend time on it.
 
Stewart said:
. . .

you are worrying about Al Pacino uttering a few 'fucks'?
Click to expand...

As my son likes to say, It's very vice-presidential. Who's more evil, Dick Cheney or some made-up Cuban drug fiend? Dick doesn't have a gun in his hand; he's got henchpeople to do the bad.l
 
Stewart said:
Never stifle someone's development by your own inabilty to cope with things or what you perceive another's strengths or weaknesses to be.
Click to expand...


I am a card carrying member of the Mean Mommy Club. I am responsible for the development of all of my children. Should one of my sons end up in prison for being a serial rapist/murderer, I would blame myself entirely and wonder what I did wrong in raising him. Did I let him watch too much sex and violence on tv? And? And? If one of my daughters ends up turning tricks to support her coke habit, what did I do wrong? Of course, they are adults by this time and responsible for making their own decisions, but things we are exposed to as children have an effect on us as adults.

Now, on the other hand, sex is a natural part of life and my children know where they come from. But that knowledge varies from child to child. My 10 year old knows everything. My 5 year old just knows that babies come from mommies' tummies, and they get there because daddies and mommies love each other so much that they want a baby to share this love with. This is called age-appropriate truth. Am I stifling my 5 yo's development by not letting him watch porn? No, I am helping him develop into a man who respects the power of the act and the woman he shares it with.

Honey, I have been through more crap than you know. I can handle anything life throws at me and I have as my goal in life to help my children become capable adults who know their own strengths and weaknesses.

It is a parent's job to guide their child's development. It's not "stifling", either, it is called "not feeding them too the wolves". I am a Mother, and I take that title and the job that goes with it very seriously.
 
peanuts

There's a reason why the adults in Peanuts cartoons talk like "Wha whaa, wha wha wha whaaa."

Kids don't want long drawn out reasoning. It's a now or never world.

If my choices are saying "No, because you're not old enough."
or "Go ahead, it's your life to run as you please." I'll stick with the first one.

Hopefully by the time they're older they will be into something else. Or at least they will have better cognitive skills to handle what they're reading or looking at, or listening to.

I tell my kids there's no rush, all that stuff will be there for many years to come. You'll have a turn. For now, why not try this. And hope I can divert them towards something more appropriate. If the diversion does not work, than just a solid "No. Because I said so." is the end all be all.
 
sorry i have no clue, i guess it depends on how you child is growing!! how mature it is and all this stuff, i hate this things when they say you can watch this movie when you're 12 years old!! that's stupid, some kids can work with that and other get nightmares!!
 
I agree with honeydevil. A child's maturity is to be considered when introducing them to certain things. I mean, you don't want your kid going to daycare and telling the teacher to "**** off", much less telling you to. Don't kids need to learn how to deal with disappointment in another way? Children need the maturity to deal with what they're watching and know how to filter out what doesn't need to be mimicked. What if all kids were running around acting like Al Pacino in Scarface (since we're picking on that movie)? What a mess.

I see both sides of this argument. I was not exposed to anything "negative" as a child; I had very strict parents. As a result, I developed far fetched ideas like "everyone who drinks is alcoholic" or "if you drink at all, you're drunk and do stupid things". Basically anything I developed a bad opinions of things I had never been exposed to. That's because humans fear anything they don't know (or haven't been exposed to). So, some exposure to sad or violent things (the news is a good place to start) and learning to deal with them is very important. Just like Stewart said, horrible things are happening everyday, and it's important to know that life isn't perfect; it isn't fair. I've had to go to stress management therapy because I had this idea that everything should go right or else life just wasn't worth it. Three sessions was all it took for me to learn lessons that I feel like I missed from being too sheltered. I'm not angry about it, but life is tough, and kids aren't too young to start learning that.

I agree with Novella that a lot of violent entertainment is rubbish, and we should lead by example if we don't like that kind of stuff. For those of us that do enjoy violent movies, please note my first post.

However, pornography can be just as addictive as alcohol, gambling or cocaine. There is NO reason to expose your 12 year old to it; it's against the law anyway. If a child is already asking about it, that's something you may want to go to counseling WITH your child about. I know I've had sexual feelings since about the time I started school, but giving a kid porn is like handing him an eight ball of coke. Then you're just playing Russian roulette. Maybe he comes out okay. Maybe not. There's plenty of psychological studies out there to back that up. Regular exposure to porn can cause bad attitudes toward the opposite sex to develop. If you need a source, I'll site my roommate who has a psych degree. With kids a it's really monkey see, monkey do. My teacher friends tell me of pre-kindergarten kids acting out sexual material they were exposed to with other pre-k kids. The child was already learning that he needed to stick his hand up girls' skirts. His chances of viewing women as objects, not people, just got increased. How can that be healthy?
 
i see our society stripping away the innocence of childhood, not protecting it. pop stars are getting younger and youger and wearing less and less. video games with graphic violence are being marketed to a younger audiance. etc etc. i don't understand why wanting to preserve your child's innocence for as long as possible is viewed so negatively. what is wrong with living in a world with primary colours and a giant yellow bird teaching the alphabet? the average lifespan is getting longer and longer, yet we only get those few years where we really do wear rose coloured glasses. the world will come knocking soon enough, and i will be there to guide my boys through all the horrible things that await them, with honesty and intelligence. if i don't know the answer then we will look for it together. but am i going to introduce my 10 year old to hard core porn because he asks? what if he asks to jump of the garage with an umbrella? it's the same logic.



Stewart said:
I blame the flipside of media for all this over protectiveness of children - they have their buzzwords which helps instill fear in the general populace. Words like paedophile create mass - yet unnecessary - panic and the occasional witchhunt.
Click to expand...

unnecessary. when i read this initially, my blood just boiled. boiled! but later i realized, you don't have kids. explaining the raw, visceral fear that this "buzzword" instills in parents, to someone who does not have children( and please those who are deeply offended by paedophiles, and or have been damaged by these monsters, this is only directed at those who would say something this flip) is impossible. yes the world is rampant with evil, as you listed before. this is something so evil and so insidious it defies description. a paedophile HUNTS children. that is their goal. they hunt them down, seduce them, and then damage them beyond all repair. they are faceless and they are everywhere.
 
I agree with a lot of this, jenn.

Though regarding a child's "innocence," parents have to be sure that they are not just seeing what they want to see.

Since my son went to school he's been bringing home misinformation from other kids about sex, stuff on television, drugs, weaponry (a lot of his peers have shotguns of their own) all kinds of ideas that he was not exposed to at home. If I hadn't relentlessly pursued an open conversation with him about these things from a really early age, he would have appeared "innocent" and ignorant of these issues, because he would never bring them up himself, particularly after age 9 or so.

He heard jokes about condoms, but did he know about AIDS and pregnancy? He knew "all" about pot and drinking, but did he know about the long-term effects of a habit? He had all kinds of misinformation about sex and physical development, and of course the boys were sharing the worst kind of porn off the internet (this is commonplace now). He thought he knew the meaning of some words, but he didn't have a clue. So I gave him the right information.

A lot of my friends have kids the same age. I will say, Did you hear about the locker search for pot? No, they hadn't. Nobody in middle school smokes pot, they say. Did you hear that kids are having sex backstage? No way, their kid is not interested in girls yet. Their kid is totally "innocent," Meanwhile, the reality is that some kids are getting high and having sex, and their parents love and "protect" them, but have no idea what's going on. And they don't want to hear about it either. In fact, they will deny it until they have "proof."

I had 'overprotective' parents like that. I had a strict early curfew all through high school, but did they know I was tripping when I got home? Did they know I climbed out the window later? I was a really good student, so they thought their 'overprotectiveness' was working. Well, I can tell you, they didn't have a clue. The world came knocking on my door and I never hesitated and never told them a thing, and they had no idea. The truth is "all the horrible things that await them" don't seem so horrible when you're 12 or 14 and curious and want to be with your peers and your parents seem like dinosaurs who don't know anything about life.
 
novella
oh i agree with you 100%. i meant innocence in the very basic sense, santa claus, tooth fairy, barney, what have you.( my kids are under 4) i was mostly riled up at some of the other comments that should a child ask to see something then they must be ready for it, and by all means, here you go kid. i feel that saying well the world is bad and there are bad things out there so just get it over with, you can't hide them from it, seems like such a cop out and ambivalant. but i also think most of those comments came from people without kids. i needed to rant.
it is such a balancing act for parents, you don't need to overexpose them, but in the end, the better equiped your kids are with the correct information the better. i have a sister in law whose 11 year old daughter does not yet know about periods. well so she thinks. i bet dollars to doughnuts that her daughter does know and that her info is wrong or warped.
and i think you said in one of your earlier comments about a kid even wanting to see this stuff ie: violence, porn whatever. i agree with that too. if a kid is not sheltered from it, but given reasons for why this is crap or why this is offensive and then given the chance to voice their opinions, then hopefully they will be less drawn to it or at the very least have an opinion that is not just that of their peers.
i was lucky. i had very open parents,who answered questions,and asked the right ones. i still did shitty things, but my cousins(baptist pastor dad) wow, they were really off the wall with their rebellion, and they will tell you to this day, it was because they were curious. what was dad keeping from them?
 
sex is more frightening - for me

Let’s not forget most children’s natural desire to rebel against parents’ wishes. No matter how much you may try to convince a child something is worthless trash, all it takes is for one or two “friends” to add some teasing, peer pressure, or a simple dare to undo anything a parent has tried to achieve.

There’s also the issue of older kids loving to torment younger kids with everything in their power.
Teasing them about being babies, which in turn creates a desire to appear more “grown up”.

I also think for clarification purposes I was not talking about pornography and it’s classic definition when I originally created this thread. I find the thought of any parent “allowing” a child of any age to get involved in any type of pornography positively outrageous. That being said I also understand there are many definitions of what pornography is. There’s a difference between erotic and pornographic, but that line is very blurry.

But even MTV, which I consider to be “pornographically suggestive” in many cases, is hard for a parent to watch with a 12 year old and that’s mostly innuendo.

I feel there’s too much sex, and violence in the media. But if I had to choose which one scares me more it’s sex. I have two daughters. It’s much easier to explain why violence is trashy and not necessary, but much more difficult to explain why sex is better left for later in life. My wishes are much, much later in life.
 
Motokid said:
I feel there’s too much sex, and violence in the media. But if I had to choose which one scares me more it’s sex. I have two daughters. It’s much easier to explain why violence is trashy and not necessary, but much more difficult to explain why sex is better left for later in life. My wishes are much, much later in life.
Click to expand...


i have boys .and as a woman, i don't envy you the task of raising daughters, especially when it comes to sex. i wonder, what do others think, are girls more difficult to raise, or is it that we are(pause as i look for the right phrase) more comfortable with the "idea" that boys can take care of themselves?(this is a question, not my opinion)
 
boys and girls

As my officemate (who has two boys) like to remind me:

For each child he has, he only has to worry about one penis.
I, on the other hand have to worry about all of them.

I don't mind some stereotyping.
I think raising girls is much more stressful than raising boys.
It's much easier for boys to run away from the responcibilities of sex, and pregnancy than girls.

That's why I laugh when the majority of abortion rights activists seem to be men. Why are men making laws governing things like having babies? Men are historically destroyers.
 
my husband says that all the time about the penis thing.....he only has one dick to worry about. true. i have this discussion all the time with my friends. we've come to no conclusion, but most agree that girls are initially easier and then progressively more challenging whereas boys are the opposite. also it seems that if and when girls marry they tend to stay close with their own parents, where boys, should they marry, tend to go off with their wives families.
 
girls

My kids pediatrician says that girls will take care of you when you get old, and boys will not.

Most parents I talk to agree with your findings.

Keep up the good work, and keep your boys away from my girls... :D
 
Moto and Jenn--
I have two boys and two girls. :eek: And they are very different to raise. I think it is mostly a social aspect. I have the task of teaching my boys to respect girls while teaching my girls to stand up for themselves, while the world tells them the opposite.
 
cajunmama,
four children, you are busy, how do find the time to come on here? are you sneaking out at 4 in the morning? what are their ages if you don't mind?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top