What do you allow your children to see/hear?

I never want children but I'm interested in this because it seems increasingly hard to have any sort of control.

Quite a few times I've heard really little kids talking about Grand Theft Auto. I'd guess lots of kids watch Walking Dead and Game Of Thrones and once enough kids are into these things, others get get made fun of for not being allowed? Lots of parent must cave in about it?

What about swearing? Swearing is everywhere on the internet and there's nothing to be done about it. Most people don't think twice about posting extreme violence on blogs, forums and youtube.

Fandom for cartoons, games and comics makes it very easy to slide into really screwed up fan art, especially on tumblr, where you're always a few clicks away from someone's horrible fetish page or those chan sites with every type of foulness. I have to wonder if as many teens were into scat, cruelty and gore in the 90s and earlier but just never shared it with anyone.

Maybe children deal with all this stuff much better than we expect?

I recall a friend of a friend showing his very small children lots of John Waters films and they really loved them, the dad didn't think there was anything they couldn't deal with. But I don't know which films.

pretty sure there's already a thread about this on the I Love People-Making Board...

John Waters is pretty harmless imo, sure it's gross but it isn't horrifying realistic violence or anything, it's all very goofy. Kids love scatalogical humor (duh). Not that I've shown my daughter Pink Flamingos yet or anything. I can see small kids loving Hairspray and Crybaby and maybe Serial Mom too. Would assume a lot of the sex stuff would go over their heads.

anyway I think a lot of what you reference has to do with access to media (do they have a phone? unrestricted TV viewing? etc.) and not so much about specific shows/films/games, which are pretty easy to control and filter out once you have control over what media they're using.

The other factor is obviously just determining what's age appropriate, when they're ready for stuff, when they are interested in various ideas - which is going to vary from child to child. There are kids younger than my daughter who have seen Walking Dead (which seems insane to me) and there are kids older than her that are scared by Pixar movies - so there's a scale. You just have to estimate what's healthiest for their kid, what is/is not likely to traumatize them. Sometimes you can predict this, sometimes you can't.

Do you worry about what they might see at other kids houses?

I honestly have no idea how I'm going to deal with the internet once my son is old enough to have (and expect to have) unrestricted access to the www (he's five nearly six).

not really, they don't go anywhere where I don't know the parents and what they'll be doing (if I'm not going to be there)

xposts

yeah unrestricted internet access is really the big question, which I don't plan on facing until my daughter hits at least double digits or possibly her teens

Yeah we both definitely have a few years to go.

My almost 3 year old is allowed to watch almost unlimited amounts of Steven Universe.

for my part I feel like my kids are being raised in a social environment where TV/screen viewing is a special/unusual - as opposed to ubiquitous - thing. They aren't in houses where the TV is on all the time (which seemed to be a thing back in the 80s but I literally don't know anyone - much less any parents - who do this anymore). They don't have devices of their own. They don't know how to search a web browser. They might hear from older/other kids that there's some scary zombie show called Walking Dead but that doesn't mean they have any means (or interest) in accessing it.

If they're watching something it's cuz someone's put a movie on specifically for them to watch, or has handed them a phone so they can play Minions or Minecraft or whatever. And while they know there are things that are "for adults", they aren't really aware of how easily that stuff is accessed or how much of it there is.

pretty sure there's already a thread about this on the I Love People-Making Board...

This one I remember:

Censorship & Parenting

Alex- What kind of internet restriction do you mean? It's one thing to have constant supervision but firewalls aren't very effective at filtering out adult content at all.
There is no obstacle between regular Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Pokemon and Ben 10 fan tumblrs and fan fetish tumblrs.

I think by the time I was 13 I could probably deal with most extreme content but it still worries me to think about how I might have dealt with some of the worst things I've seen.

Think there was more recent discussion, but just in the general threads or something.

i don't have any kids and will likely never have any kids but i often think about this in the abstract too given the internet etc.

if kids are looking for stuff beyond the age-appropriate range, they're going to find it, but of course how they process it (as Οὖτις) says above, going to depend on the kid. since my parents basically thought comic books were all kid-friendly, i was exposed to some insane shit by the time i was 12/13 -- pretty sure i saw r. crumb's "joe blow" by then for instance -- and i think i handled it okay. but i am sure it molded (or marred) my psyche in some way that i couldn't have been aware of at the time. (and probably i'm still not fully aware of now.)

i think my brain probably would have exploded if i'd had unrestricted access to the internet at that age. and i was *looking* for extreme stuff. i don't envy anyone who's had a kid in the past ten years.

for my part I feel like my kids are being raised in a social environment where TV/screen viewing is a special/unusual - as opposed to ubiquitous - thing. They aren't in houses where the TV is on all the time (which seemed to be a thing back in the 80s but I literally don't know anyone - much less any parents - who do this anymore).

several years ago we got rid of our cable and now we just have netflix/amazon/hbo go. the thing w/streaming of course is that the TV can't be constantly on, there's no channel changing, there are pretty much zero advertisements, and it takes a little more effort. there have been times where an octonauts marathon happened but i don't feel terrible about that,

it's not even really firewalls necessarily anymore. my friends with young kids let them use tablets (iPad, kindle fire, whatever) but there's not a need or interest for them to use a traditional computer. with tablets, you can lock things down to where they're using youtube, video apps, games, but you can lock youtube into restricted mode, make them unable to install new games, and lock out the web browser

this won't work as soon as kids are old enough to understand or need web access, but by that point, it's going to be difficult unless you set the expectation that everyone does their online stuff in the living room and that's not going to fly for teens

there's not a need or interest for them to use a traditional computer. with tablets, you can lock things down to where they're using youtube, video apps, games, but you can lock youtube into restricted mode, make them unable to install new games, and lock out the web browser

yes this is v common

I don't think anyone expects a firewall to do anything

I'm definitely a fan of the control Netflix/Amazon give you over content, combined with the lack of ads. Lately my daughter is watching almost exclusively Octonauts and then wowing me with all kinds of arcane undersea life knowledge. And it's a pretty sweet and benign show and has some positive female characters, though I wish there were more.

our friends bought their 4 yr old an iPad and within weeks she had surreptitiously purchased like 20 apps because of some kind of one-click purchasing thing.

Octonauts is awesome

xp

yeah octonauts is great, and for a few days there our kid would wander into the kitchen and grab a carrot and say "looks like somethin's wrong with the Gup-A, cap"

4yo doesn't need a fucking iPad, that one belongs on the This is the thread where we judge other people's parenting

I suspect we don't really understand fully the ways that media content affects children's minds. I don't think violence turns people into killers or porn turns them into rapists or anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if certain kinds of content still affect the way we think, our emotional well being, etc.

ilx ruins my mind, god only knows what is going to happen when an eight year old stumbles on to it

K (4.5 now) used to do some iPad -- it was sort of a sticking point for us. My wife thought it was better than TV because it was interactive, but watching her I felt like it reduced her frustration tolerance and maybe discourage practice/encouraged laziness and bad habits. Who really knows.

Sometimes I really do feel like facebook and smartphones are bad for my mental health.

Alex- What kind of internet restriction do you mean? It's one thing to have constant supervision but firewalls aren't very effective at filtering out adult content at all.

Right now my son literally has no access to the internet. At some point in the future, he will have access to it where I (or my wife) is not around. At that point he will have unrestricted access basically (or least I will assume he will have unrestricted access to it) minus whatever parental controls or restrictions are applied to whatever device he's using have.

Octonauts is fantastic as is Odd Squad.

Find Wild Kratts a little annoying though.

Previously mentioned almost 3 year old has had her own iPad since before she was two, with a couple of dozen games installed on it. But honestly, she doesn't use it that often. Rarely requests it and really only gets interested when get it out myself. Even then it holds her attention maybe a half hour? I wish she would get more addicted!!

Ask yourself what you had access to as a kid and work from there, ish

I mean if you think culture can negatively affect children then there's no point in history when they haven't been exposed to negative culture and most of it was regarded as being acceptable

I feel like Octonauts approaches some kind of Platonic ideal of the "safe" kids show - no violence/villains, every episode is about solving a problem/helping somebody, a modicum of science/educational/eco-conscious values, a mixed gender/ethnicity cast*, and it actually looks pretty good/is well designed.

(*I do lol @ the accents, reminds me of the birds in the Tiki Room at Disneyland, except in this case all of them are British/former British colonies - with the exception of Peso I guess?)

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no point in history when they haven't been exposed to negative culture

history is p depressing litany of endless violence and despair tbh

Which is why worrying about the odd Waters movie is way misguided

since one of my main reasons for not procreating is the unshakable internalized belief that i'd be a terrible parent i try not to think too hard about what specific ways i would actualize that particular self-fulfilling prophecy

either i'd let them see and do everything or i'd let them see and do nothing. probably i'd wind up wildly and inconsistently veering between the two.

My almost 3 year old is allowed to watch almost unlimited amounts of Steven Universe.

― Jeff, Friday, August 19, 2016 12:08 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you're a good parent

How effective is the restricted youtube mode? I don't think many video uploaders check the adult content box and when they do its mostly for nudity and sex, and they often don't even bother then. Then there's the harsh language of the commenters on any type of video.
Are parents these days less concerned about shielding children from harsh language as long as their children don't use those words?

I can't see anything good at work when the firewall forces restricted mode, I know that much

it also hides all comments

Yup. I dont care about swearing personally, as long as they understand that its inappropriate in various social situations like school, work, in public etc.

My son watched the Octonauts' 'A Vegimal Christmas' about 100 times while he was in the hospital for a couple days. During that time I loaded up 'I'm Alan Partridge' and watched both series. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Simon "Michael" Greenall is also the voice of Captain Barnacles!

My main problem with content is having to avoid things that have extremely cloying voices. I have a high tolerance for kids stuff where they don't talk down to the kids and treat them like they're babies, but so many productions (most American ones) are really horrible in that regard.

The other issue that i didn't have growing up is that now kids can watch the same damn thing over and over. They don't even want to try anything new. </70s>

That was definitely a thing in the vhs era. Some of my friends knew a kid who regularly watched the same film 6 times in a row.

Once I was reading my little cousin a picture book and he got me to read it about 4 times in a row. I wonder if that's what a pre-video tape and videogame kid would do? But he did keep shouting "again!" like in Teletubbies (which he was a fan of).

My main problem with content is having to avoid things that have extremely cloying voices. I have a high tolerance for kids stuff where they don't talk down to the kids and treat them like they're babies, but so many productions (most American ones) are really horrible in that regard.

Yes! I started playing nursery rhymes for my son on my phone when he was a baby (initally just in my pocket for the music but obviously he later got interested in the videos). There are like 2 UK ones that are OK but I have finally allowed him to watch some popular US ones which admittedly have better production values but the voices, oh my god, awful. There's one that actually makes me anxious because it sounds like the kid singing is so out of breath she's gonna suffocate or something.

I'm a bit torn on Youtube videos, he loves them and doesn't really watch tv (he's 20 months old) so it's a bit of quiet sit-down time for me but I have to restrict the time otherwise he'd be there for hours.
It's a mix of nursery rhymes - which do seem to have helped with his counting, some short tv shows like Timmy Time, or 'real' things like videos of cows, zoo animals but the worst is fire engines/police sirens and buses etc which he can watch for a while. There are really shitty ones of the 'parts' of the fire engine being put together with dumb noises and then some guy yells DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE NAUGHTY GHOST IN MY HOUSE arghhh

Actually his current favourite thing is looking at videos of himself that we've taken, I have no idea how it will potentially mess up a kid's mind to be able to see himself on video whenever he wants, of stuff he's just done or of being a baby.

Repeated content was actually shown to be best for learning. I think I read that in some article on Blue's Clues years ago. Nickolodeon did a lot of research and then decided to run each episode twice in a row

I feel like Octonauts approaches some kind of Platonic ideal of the "safe" kids show - no violence/villains, every episode is about solving a problem/helping somebody, a modicum of science/educational/eco-conscious values, a mixed gender/ethnicity cast*, and it actually looks pretty good/is well designed.

― Οὖτις, Friday, August 19, 2016 4:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is daniel tiger's neighborhood (minus science/eco-conscious). but def a great show for socio-emotional learning. my son's watching it right now on the pbs kids thingy on roku.

Why are children’s movies so obsessed with piss now

not a parent, but I was impressed that my friends only let their 2.5yr old watch any tv (Hilda on Netflix usually) one night a week

Numberblocks has taught my 4-year-old a very surprising amount of maths. He's gone from being able to count to 10 to being able to do multiplication and division up to over 100. Maybe this was always going to be his thing anyway, but I certainly wasn't going to be the one to teach it to him.

the numberblocks ad currently running on cbeebies has forever branded the phrase ‘FOURRR FOURRRS’ across my brain

#just2019parentthings

wow, CAL... Will see if mine likes Numberblocks!
If my 4yo watches tv in the day he gets in a ridiculous grumpy mood when he has to switch it off. especially if he's not got anything specific to do afterwards. I'm having to say he can only watch it directly before tea time.