...our previous neighbors (so glad they moved) allowed their kids to play want they wanted and my kids were over their house watching their son (10 years old) play a violent video game (don't remember what) and my kids came home fighting each other and my daughter got hurt.
But how is that the fault of the other kids or their parents? Your kids were trying something they aren't used to doing, and because of that they got hurt.
My husband spent about 1/3 of his childhood living in Asia. The kids there (mostly his relatives, but in his middle school years he lived at a boarding school during the week in Taiwan, not with relatives) for the most part knew and respected martial arts. They had Power Rangers there LONG before it came to the US. The kids watched it, enjoyed it, and...that's IT.
When he got back to the States and PR showed up here, his American friends watched it,enjoyed it, and played it. And got hurt repeatedly.
That's NOT the fault of Power Rangers, but of the kids who decided that a show needs to be emulated to be fully enjoyed. If it were the show's fault, then all the kids he knew in Korean and Taiwan during those years would also be getting injured. But they weren't because they had more discipline and could just enjoy the show as something to *watch*. He is American, but by coming upon Power Rangers with kids that were more controlled internally than his friends in the States, he too learned control. (the tae kwon do from a VERY serious teacher, not a belt-school, helped)
It's also important to remember that some kids tend to exaggerate when they really want something. "Why can't I play a rated M game? Joey's mom lets him." "Joey stays up until midnight, why can't I?" It may or may not be true. I wouldn't assume other kids are allowed to do things based on reports from kids who are in the heat of negotiation!
So absolutely, positively true.
...just that I thought Ted was an odd choice for a favorite movie for a 6 year old (one of the most vulgar movies I have seen in a long time, but I thought it was hilarious as well).
I haven't seen Ted, but I was a child who was watching really mature stuff from right around the age of 4. It was around that time that SNL started, and I had serious sleeping problems AND my room was directly off of the living room. My mom would watch shows like that, I would have horrible dreams (not related to the shows! dinosaurs and counting and counting giant dominoes and weird things like that) and come out, and she would just leave the show on while trying to help me. That morphed into me being able to watch it.
I remember watching Richard Pryor (not on SNL but on laser discs) LONG before I should have been listening to that stuff. Watching The Jerk (which is really grownup!) and laughing and laughing.
But...I just didn't understand it. It was completely over my head. I remember some Eddie Murphy sketch on the fake news when a two letter word for "lady of the night" was used in the book title "How to be a
that word". I remember laughing my rear end off at that sketch, but the understanding I had of that word and the book was so completely different from what the word really means. I can't remember anymore what I thought it meant, but from the outside it looked like I got the joke and thought it was funny, but I was getting a totally different joke than what it was.
Kids to a certain age just don't get it. I think it was at around 5 that DS managed to see Dodgeball. He thought some stuff was hilarious, and didn't get the other stuff. I would casually talk to him about some things he would laugh at, and just like me, he had this whole other joke in his head. There's a scene where there's a carwash, and there are some provocative outfits in it, and as an extended-nursed kid he saw nothing but women who could nurse many children. There's a further bit in that scene with a man making lewd gestures at another man, and it went so far over his head it wasn't even relevant to DS.
Nowadays we don't let him watch that; I think those days ended at about 7.5 years old. His reactions to the movie changed; he was starting to get that there were other meanings, so it's off limits now. He can watch it again when he's older.
But he can say "my dad let me watch Dodgeball, it was really funny", and some parent who hears that without me there to explain is going to faint.
I bet you the 6 year old has NO understanding of what is going on in Ted, and any nudity just isn't having the same effect on him as you think it is.
However, many of his friends his age have NONE of these rules, even as guidelines. What is particularly causing me an issue is so many of his 9 year old, even 8 year old friends are allowed to play whatever video games, whatever ratings, however long and often they wish. These games have sex in them, barely dressed women, lots of violence, glorify crimes, etc. There is plenty of time to play these when he is several years older.
Please help me understand, are the parents just lazy, unaware of what the games entail, or am I too strict??
Since you don't have an answer to the bolded, it must mean you haven't talked to them. You might consider talking to them. It's possible the kids are embellishing the truth. A lot.
The parents also might simply not know what the games entail. Or they don't know the kids are playing them.
It's also incredible what a child can glean from commercials. I homeschool, DH travels, and apart from Sunday mornings every so often when DH is here and they get up early to play Madden football, I'm with my kid 24/7. (oh our recent cruise was glorious, with hours and hours of the two of us not being in each others faces...we enjoyed the time apart unapologetically!) I know what he's allowed to see. But he'll pipe up with things that really shock me, and it turns out it's from ads that played during a show he was allowed to watch. I wish I had a recent example, but the recent one really surprised me.
His videogames are either sports, one Clone Wars game, and the rest are
Lego videogames (love them!). From the videogames he has exact knowledge, just without the realistic mental images, of what happens in the movies. We still haven't let him see Star Wars Revenge of the Sith (b/c of what Anakin does to the Padawans)...heck, I still haven't seen it...but he knows what happens because of the games. So he could talk about that movie as though he has seen it, and unless he shares HOW he knows it, you would think he has seen it.
By the way, the question isn't "why don't they raise their kids the way I raise mine" the question is really "how am I going to manage that fact?"
It's a really good point.
I know that we deal with that here, and in at least one area other families deal with it with us. The one "problem" area is meat. We are vegetarian and have almost no other friends who are. Most of our friends are paleo, actually! I say that if I ate like a paleolithic person I'd be the slow one that couldn't catch meat, that cried while killing it, and that just went and gathered the nuts and berries.
Our closest-in-other-philosophies friends actually buy big slabs of pig and render it down to lard.
So, yeah, we've had talks with DS about why they eat what they eat, and I know (because they shared it with me) that they have had talks with their son about what a "vegetarian" is and why "they" eat what they eat (or most importantly why "they" don't eat bacon, LOL). They know we're into Disney and have actually had GOOD experiences with TV in terms of learning for DS (I credit Blue's Clues with helping DS finally start to talk). I know that the husband loves Disney but that as a family they aren't into it, and they focus on the negatives that TV brings into home life. (they also have LOTS of family, very involved family, in the same town, and we have none, and that makes a pretty big difference with levels of burnout and the ability to hang out all day every day with your kids without turning on the TV...)
Already my son deals with a difference in many of the families we know by NEVER saying that he's going to WDW or DLR or Universal, but rather saying that he's going to California or Florida. He has watched me do the same, because the last thing I want to do is start a "they're going, why can't we?" problem in a home, when the other family might have really great reasons for not going.
Another issue is that we WERE rather permissive in terms of movies when DS was little. He looked big to our eyes, he seemed big, and the Pirates movies were introduced at what I now realize was probably too early. 3 is probably too early.
Then again, he had two GREAT meetings with Jack Sparrow at that age, which wouldn't have been the same if he hadn't known who Jack was. I know that some friends have seen more movies, I know some have seen fewer. We try to help him not just randomly talk about those things unless he KNOWS that they have already seen the movies. (this is lightening as he gets older and especially since he tends to make older friends)
So Crisi is very right with that. It's a "what can we do" question. Definitely.
