Censorship

[radegund]

I've been having this discussion with myself and others since my post about the battery farm featured in a Thomas the Tank Engine story: to what extent do I as a parent want to control my children's cultural experience?

What upset me so much about the battery farm thing, I think, was that I thought I had Thomas pegged: a bit moralistic, a bit sexist, a bit right-wing, a bit (no, very) tedious, but basically, more or less, taking one thing with another, harmless. I'd relaxed my guard - I'd let Oisín watch stories that I hadn't previewed, and so on. However, intense and unnecessary cruelty to animals is simply not a subject about which I want to answer searching questions from my three-year-old child. (There are plenty of other things I don't feel precisely ready to discuss with him either (off the top of my head: domestic violence, diamond mining, neo-liberal economics...), but I'm fairly confident that these won't feature in most of the cultural artefacts aimed at his age-group. When they do arise, in other words, it won't be while I'm reading him his bed-time story.) I felt blind-sided. I wished I'd made a point of reading through every magazine and annual that K has bought for him, so I'd at least have been forewarned. But more strongly, I wished that the creators of the annual had taken more care that this measure not be necessary. As I said in my earlier post, I am always upset by bad art (by which I mean sloppy, ill-thought-out, cliched, patronising - and yes, this is clearly subjective) aimed at children - they deserve better, I nebulously feel - but this felt more like negligence.

Anyway. I implied at the end of that post that I'd deintroduce Thomas if I could. But that's not quite true. I may not like it much, but Oisín decidedly does - and he clearly gets a lot out of it that I judge to be positive. The annual containing the battery farm story has quietly gone away, but I wouldn't feel justified in imposing a blanket ban.

When I was a child, my parents filtered pretty actively. They exposed me to lots of "higher" culture (selected classic children's literature, classical music, galleries and museums), and declined to engage with whole swathes of "lower" culture (no Enid Blyton books, no Disney films). I don't say "refused", here, because there was never a particular fuss made about it. My impression is that (a) they wanted me to learn to respond to (some version of) "good" art, and (b) they were keen to avoid drawing an artificial distinction between "general" culture and "children's" culture - and I was so well supplied with cultural stimulus that perhaps it didn't occur to me to complain.

Ideologically, although I understand the argument for this approach, I don't like it. My friend gibtsdochnicht, years ago, made the point that children are entitled to their own cultural tastes. I feel this strongly to be true. (At the time, I was aghast that her niece was allowed to have Barbie dolls.) I feel that my interaction with culture was overmanaged, and that I missed out on a lot of straightforward, downright enjoyment as a result of the constant need to evaluate, to make sure that what I was considering liking was in fact worthy of approval. A key fear is that failure to employ careful filters will lead to children innocently internalising pernicious memes, but I don't really believe it's that simple - and I know several people whose cultural consumption was far, far less carefully monitored than mine, and who didn't, after all, grow up to be bigoted, mainstream-identified oafs (or should that be oaves?).

The tricky bit is that emotionally, I can see my parents' point. Clearly, without vast and inappropriate effort, you can't actually control what cultural messages your children receive, but I viscerally dislike the idea of harbouring cultural products in my home that make me feel queasy. (I don't like reading badly written stories, either - I'd never buy a book for Oisín without reading it first to determine whether I'm capable of reading it cheerfully, say, eight times a day for six weeks. But that's pure selfishness, not ideologically rooted at all. I think.)

Of course, you can go too far in the other direction, too. When I expressed my approval of a toy lorry with three recycling bins that K had bought for Oisín, she looked sharply at me and said, "Oooh, the Thought Police!" She showers Oisín with lots and lots of whatever he's interested in, even - maybe even particularly - if she can't see the merit. That's not a position I'm prepared to take. (And in fairness, she probably has limits too. I don't know that she'd buy him a toy gun, for instance, if he evinced an interest. At least. Hmmm. I ... think she probably wouldn't.)

So where do I draw the line? I think what I'm trying to say here is, I'M CONFLICTED OMG HELP.

What about you? If you have kids, how minutely do/did you manage their cultural experiences, and along what general principles? What about when you were a child? Were your parents more towards the anything-goes or the thought-police end of the spectrum? How did you feel about it at the time? How do you feel about it now?

Answers on a postcard, please. (Or comment here, if you feel that would in some way be more convenient.)

Comments

[ailbhe]

I'm deeply grateful that my in-laws and sisters all believe that any gift given to a very young child should be acceptable to the child's parents. And I'm also grateful that I have girls, because the most upsetting thing I can think of now is the day I saw a child holding a toy gun to Linnea's temple. People don't give guns to girls, so I may never see Linnea holding one to Emer's temple.

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

Toy guns are just horrific.

[ailbhe]

I had a bow and arrow, as a child, I think because it was a hunting weapon. It came with a sheriff's badge and an empty holster.

Hm. I wonder why the holster was empty? Can't call mum and ask, called her twice already today.