Censorship: A guide out of it

Censorship in todays world is more challenging than ever. A kid in a small town fifty years ago was not bombarded with information like our kids are, nor was information of all kinds so easily accessible to him. Once you might have just needed to verify your son didn’t buy the wrong magazine and hide it under his bed. Today the digital information at the tips of his fingers is mind boggling and frightening.

Given that the dangers are greater, parents like myself are tempted – some might say forced – to exercise a very strict policy on what their kids can see and read. For example, in the early years of our kids lives Michelle and I filtered any movie or show not just for graphic immodesty and violence, but also cursing. We used sites like this one to not only get information on the final rating of a movie, but also understand better what, if any, problematic scenes there might be, including the type of language we can find in them.

We ran with this policy of close-to-zero cursing policy for a long time, until recently. I was looking for a fun movie to watch with the kids, and remembered “My Cousin Vinny”. This comedy is very wholesome overall. The characters are likeable, and other than the fact that the heroes are accused of murder, there is no violence. But the cursing… The movie is riddled with it. It’s used as part of framing the main characters, showing how their rough NY style does not fit in with the small town where the murder trial takes place.

What to do? I asked myself. Then I asked Michelle, and we both found ourselves in a bit of a bind. On the one hand, I knew the curses were not a really important part of the movie, and that our kids would not adopt that kind of language themselves (Michelle and I don’t curse at all, even when we stub our toe and the kids are not around). On the other hand, by now they would probably react in a hyper-manner to the curses, since it was something they had hardly heard or seen.

It was at this point that I realized we had set a trap for ourselves – by over-protecting our kids, we had under-prepared them for the next stage in their exposure to the so-called real world. We needed to find a way out of this trap, and, of course – I needed to write a blog-post about how to navigate this process, of censorship and later on moving passed it.

What do you mean by “navigate”?

Let’s use our imagination, shall we?

First, take a moment and recall the first time your kids watched a cartoon or some other kids show. Perhaps they were babies, or perhaps you waited till they were older before exposure to screens. Either way, there was such a moment: the first time. You went and chose their first exposure with great care, consulting grandparents, in-laws, other parents and online experts.

Now, turn your mind to the future, when your 25 year old child is out in the world, free to do as he or she pleases. They are not at home most of the time, they have their own laptop and phone and you don’t really know what they watch online. You have no control over it. All you have is your trust: trust that you raised them to know how to filter, how to self-monitor what they watch.

In this future, you also probably don’t assume that they are watching only Baby Einstein. After all, what did you watch at 25? By then you were able to handle violence, cursing and immodest scenes, to a degree that you could not at age four (again – wherever you happen to draw the line in your life). You realize that yes, your kids are skirting some gray areas, but they are guided by the values and principles that you taught them.

And here is the rub, the crux of the issue: the question of censorship is not only a question of how to prevent exposure of young minds and souls to bad material. The question is also how to help your child get from that day in the past where you could protect them from everything, to the day in the future when they have to be resilient enough to handle themselves. My kids were, at the moment described above, hyper-sensitive to cursing. The real world has cursing, and while I never want them to wield those nonchalantly, I do want them to be able to handle it when those around them – or the movies they watched – had them.

What we need, therefore, is a method for starting with limits, but also with a process of relaxing those limits over time, to build emotional resilience. If you think about it, it’s no different than how we treat our kids medically – their immune systems are very fragile at first, and over time they need exposure to disease to become stronger and more capable to handle the mess outside.

The Key: Guided Exposure

The principle is simple, the execution – a bit tricky. For example, when you have more than one kid – we have four – it’s tricky to a point that we need a more robust strategy than just tailoring media to a kids age. What do I mean? Well, it’s not simple to have kids with an 8-year difference in age between them and control completely what the younger ones see. I can tell you now that Max is watching movies and shows that Ray never watched at his age, and for a simple reason: Ray didn’t have older siblings watching these shows in the living room.

The solution we found is this: Watch some of these shows as a family, and prepare your kids for the material in advance.

Back to “My Cousin Vinny”, then. Before watching, I told the kids (focusing on the younger ones) that they should be aware of this. I said, “Look, this movie has lots of inappropriate words, which we obviously should never use. But it’s not really an important part of the movie, so you can just ignore them”

We watched the movie. The kids laughed and enjoyed it immensely. Every so often, one of them would say “Ugh!” about a word that Vinny would use, but that was it.

In the days that past, as I thought it over, I realized that there is something more going on here, a reason why watching that movie together was important. In the same way that in a movie theater you can sense the mood of the crowd and experience the movie with strangers in the room, Max too could sense from us what aspects of the movie to zero-in on. Sometimes, he asked what happened, and we paused and explained. When some lawyerly issue took place, I gave him a short overview, to bring it closer to his world. By doing this, I ensured he focused on the central parts of the plot and story, and could easily ignore the bad ones.

Take the initiative!

You can take your time with this process. You have many years to get your kids prepared for the world outside. But the lesson here is that you gain by taking the initiative. If you wait until they see something new at a friends house or by mistake, you lose some of your power as a parent to frame what they are seeing in advance, to color their perception of reality.

So go on – take a risk! Take that first step outside of the boundaries you’ve set for your kids and open up so you can start that journey, from four years old to twenty five…

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Now, you might be reading this and saying “that’s too much” or “that’s not enough” censorship. No worries, though – in this post I’m not going to try to tell you what is right or wrong to expose your kids to. Every parent comes to the job of parenting with their own sensibilities and moral compass. What I do want to share with you here is my perspective about how to navigate within your own moral space.