I've been trying to figure out how to write this post for a while now, but I've always been stymied by worries over privacy, and paranoia over sharing too much information. However, I think I've finally figured out a way to thread the needle.
So, if you've been reading this blog for a while, you've probably realized that I haven't been a "Miss" anything for a long while, and that I have young kids. And as they've been growing up and watching more media, I've been trying to navigate how to manage their relationship with television and movies. I've run across a lot of other media-savvy parents who have been excited about sharing their favorite media with their kids, in some cases even planning out at what ages it would be best to introduce them to Ghibli movies and "Star Wars" and so forth. I, on the other hand, am trying very, very hard not to do that.
My parents are film lovers, and I watched a lot of films with them as a kid, but there was never any kind of pressure to like certain kinds of films. My mother would roll her eyes at superhero media, and my dad vocally disliked cartoons, but we watched them all the same. Looking back, I watched a lot of junk, and some of that junk has transmogrified into the classics for my generation - movies like "Hook," "Hocus Pocus," and "Space Jam." I watched some of the films my parents had grown up with, like "The Jungle Book" and "The Sound of Music," but there weren't many. In high school, I ended up discovering the "Star Wars" and "Back to the Future" movies by myself, after catching some network television broadcasts. Nearly every franchise I came to, I ended up watching all out of order.
I'm trying to keep this in mind as my kids are taking their first baby steps into the world of movies. They're still at the age when cartoons dominate their viewing choices, favorites are watched over and over again ad nauseum, and many films like "Wreck-it-Ralph" are still far too scary. I've shown them a few of my favorites, but I've been mostly letting them take the lead. We watched "The Wizard of Oz" "James and the Giant Peach," and "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" because we read the books first. Currently, they're far more interested in various television series that their friends are also watching - mostly educational shows from PBS, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. They're also primed to be more avid gamers than I ever was, already fans of "Minecraft," "Untitled Goose Game" and "Slime Rancher."
While I want my kids to be able to appreciate the good stuff, I don't necessarily want them to have the same kind of relationship with media that I've had, and they don't need to see movies and shows the "right" way. While I plan to share my love of films with my kids, I also want them to develop their own tastes. I want them to be able to discover the classics on their own, and if they have no interest in the classics, that's fine. Pushing my love of films on my kids could easily be counterproductive, especially since a lot of my favorites are films that are very much of their time. It would be nice to bond with my kids over certain pieces of media, but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.
Right now, while they're very small and super receptive to whatever I suggest, it's more important to steer them away from inappropriate and misleading media. But my kids are not going to stay small. And they already have very strong opinions and preferences. I fully expect to have to sit through many of the godawful kids' films of the 2020s, some of which will become the cult classics of Generation Z. I expect my kids to become engrossed with media that I can't stand - maybe the Logan brothers or some streamer who plays the same titles that they do. I expect they'll roll their eyes when I get excited about lame-o old Spielberg movies.
But maybe they can be convinced to watch "E.T." or "Close Encounters" with me on occasion, just for a few minutes. And I'll try to keep an open mind about whatever they want to share with me. The universe has its own ideas about how these things work, and all I can hope for is that they get through the "Pokemon" phase quickly.
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