Into the MInds of Babes Ch. 5
Chapter Five discusses the question: can scary media have a negative emotional affect on children?
Before I get into my personal experiences/views, I'd like to point out a few things that I found particularly interesting in this chapter:
-Without logic and without abstract thinking required to understand the themes of love, history, religion, hatred, betrayal, revenge and forgiveness, children take away far different ideas from media then adults do.
-In a study, children as old as 11 and 12 had difficult distinguishing between what is real and what is "unreal." Some children at this age categorize dinosaurs, knights and Indians as fake.
-Children probably cannot understand that an event on tv or in a book might not occur in real life, until after Age 4.
-David Foulkes believes that children begin to dream between the ages of 7 - 9.
-Emotional Contagion - a term used to describe how one person's emotion state can influence another's
After reading this chapter, I tried to think back to a movie, or book that had a negative affect on me. I remember when I was little, a movie was on, it was on HBO (and I knew I was not suppose to watch this channel) and I decided to watch it anyway. I cannot remember details, I cannot even remember how old I was, but I do remember the movie had something to do with throwing spaghetti noodles, onto a man that was in the bathtub. For some reason this image stuck with me, and I remember not wanting to eat pasta for quite awhile and being sick every time I thought of it. The fact that something has harmless as cooked noodles, had a negative affect on me, makes me question how ok it is to have adult material on the tv at all, in the presence of a child. I am not sure where you draw the line at "adult material," the news is definitely adult material, but I know that there has to be some sort of discretion on what a child can watch.
However, I remember that my parents rented Ghostbusters for one of my birthday parties. It was one of my favorite movies. I am not sure how old I was, but I am guessing I was 6 or 7 since, judging from when the movie came out. Anyway, one of my friends started hysterically crying and was completely terrified of the movie. Needless to say, i think my parents received a disgruntled phone call from her family. I looked up the rating and its PG, which means that parental guidance is suggested. So I guess this movie may or may not have been appropriate to show. But I think it is important to mention that no one else had the slightest bit of a negative reaction - and this was a pretty big party. Also, I think its important to mention that this is the same girl whose mother would put tape over her records to prevent her daughter from hearing any "bad" parts of stories. Yes, I think it is safe to assume that this girl has never heard the ending of "The Big, Bad Wolf." The point I am making, is that maybe too much discretion can be just as bad. This poor girl simply could not handle anything "imaginary" that was not related to candyland and unicorns. I think a part of development is seeing "non-pleasant, imaginary" things. (On a very small scale, of course.) I think seeing these things help children later, when dealing with real-life, unpleasant situations.