Introducing Violence to our children

As a parent of an infant and a toddler, you become acutely aware that there is violence, real and depicted, nearly everywhere you turn.  I wanted to introduce cartoons to my son recently, and as we watched the Roadrunner, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Popeye, etc. it became laughable at how violent they all are.  It doesn’t bother me, in fact I grew up on those cartoons and still enjoy them as an adult.  But I feel kind of like a hipocrite when nearly everywhere you turn, characters are beating each other up, hitting, punching and blowing each other to oblivion and at the same time I am teaching my son not to hit, push or injure others (or himself.)  I know that there will be a better time to introduce all of this violence to him, I’m just not sure at what point that is.  For now, we are not going to watch these violent cartoons for a while.

If we go into a local sports pub, a popular place for dinner near my house, there is usually a few screens with boxing and/or mixed martial arts being shown.  I personally enjoy watching combat sports, but I don’t want my 2 year old studying 2 people punching each other for 20 minutes. 

I might sound overly sensitive to some of you, but if you don’t have young children, you may not realize how pervasive violence has become in our society.  I know I can’t shelter my children from the negative side of life forever, but it would be nice to preserve their innocence and sweetness for as long as possible. 

Heck, even last December my wife and I sat down to watch Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer with my son, but the first few scenes are SO negative, sarcastic and full of bullying and teasing, we turned it off.  It’s hard to find even a movie made for kids that’s not violent, sarcastic, evil, negative, etc.

The best movie we have found, and the first movie we have introduced to our son is the Disney/Pixar animations movie, Cars.  It has a hero, a villian who is not THAT bad, and a nice message.  There is no violence and very little teasing and name calling.  We don’t let our son watch much televsion, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, but Blues Clues has been a show we watch fairly regularly, and now the movie Cars is our current favorite.  We watched the Disney animated Robin Hood the other day and I had forgotten how violent even that is.  We tried Finding Nemo but that was very negative and scary, and I don’t even want to start talking about the evil, violent kid next door in Toy Story, Sid.

I guess the moral of this post is that sooner or later we will have to introduce our kids to violence.  They are going to be exposed to it whether you want them to be or not.  Better to be there, and discuss it with them than have them learning on their own.  Life is not fair, but at least we can try to be.  And we can teach our kids to strive for what’s right and good, even though we are all human and will make mistakes.

Tags: blues clues, boxing, bugs bunny, cars, cartoons, combat sports, dad, daffy duck, disney, kids movies, mixed martial arts, mom, parents, pixar, popeye, roadrunner, robinhood, violence