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

[pisica.livejournal.com]

Who is K? I'm not clear how much influence she has in all this, but she's mentioned twice. 'Thought police' sounds a bit ott, though.

My parents let me read/watch what I wanted, as far as I can recall. Lolita at age 14, which I must say I read a lot differently than I did when I was 18. I do remember, in reading a book of psychologically-based essays on Alice in Wonderland, asking my mother what 'coital' meant; sadly, her response/reaction has been forgotten. :) Anyway, I'm personally glad they held to a theory of benign neglect.

[sshi.livejournal.com]

Hmmn, I'm not sure where my parents lay on that spectrum - I was under the impression that Enid Blyton was considered pretty much classic children's literature. Or at least, there wasn't any difference in treatment between that and things like The Secret Garden. We had plenty of gallery and museum visits, mostly courtesy of my dad's older brother, who wasn't married, but took a huge interest in us. Then again, he was also the purveyor of comics and later on, teen magazines, just as easily as he was visits to the National Gallery.

I suspect that this may have been towards the laissez faire end, although I would have to go and ask them if this was due to a conscious policy or just pure exhaustion. I don't remember them pre-vetting anything for me, but then again, I suspect that is only practical up to a certain age and it's quite likely that I just don't remember it.

One interesting thing, though, is that complete lack of music, either classical or otherwise. They never had a record player or other form of sound system and still don't, so we were pretty much on our own with the music, which ended up being peer-guided all the way (much later on, obv!)

This is probably of no help whatsoever, due to the fuzzy nature of my recollection, but it's a really interesting subject. I think we had a fairly conventional range of toys (Barbies, doll's houses, etc.), but with a leavening of things like Star Wars spaceships (spot the techie father :) and oodles and oodles of art materials, Lego, a sandpit, bicycles, etc. My mother is notorious for saying that she wouldn't have let us play with the cartons and tins from the cupboard, if she had known she was going to get 100% attendance at art college, but I don't think she means it, really :>

[sshi.livejournal.com]

And there I go replicating my parents prejudices - not married != no children, in several permutations and combinations. Well, he wasn't married, but the important datum was that he had no kids of his own and spent a lot of time with us.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

I try to buy Improving Literature for my godson and his sister (this basically means: books with words. I flip through the books in the shop - while I'd certainly put some books back based on their content, it's mainly to do with finding an appropriate reading level). Their parents happily indulge an overwhelming love for Spiderman and the Disney Princesses, I don't. Why add to what they're already getting in abundance, when I can give something different?

My parents were mostly laid back about what my brother and I read/watched. We didn't have a TV when we were small, but when we got one we watched kid programmes, the news and the Late Late. If we went to the cinema with both parents it tended to be a Disney film (the TRAUMA of The Incredible Journey! And Old Yeller!) if we went with just my Dad, it was often a Western or other adult-aimed film that was yet thought suitable in those antediluvian days for children (Zulu and Zulu Dawn, I'm looking at you . . . that explains a lot, actually). In children's books, my mother didn't really check what was what, but she did cast an eye over adult novels - I distinctly remember her reading The Fellowship of the Ring to make sure it was ok for kids. (The poor woman - she hates fantasy novels! She didn't read anything else by Tolkien, and it was all okayed). She did object to The Persian Boy, but I'd read it about five times by then :-)

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Ah - K is niallm's mother, who currently looks after Oisín for two days a week. So she has lots of influence :-) We have a good relationship, in which a sharp, teasing comment would generally be OK, but I did think "Thought Police" was overdoing it a bit. She was mostly teasing, but not entirely, I think.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that Enid Blyton was considered pretty much classic children's literature

And here we se me replicating my parents' prejudices. In our house, she was anathema - considered badly written, trite, sexist, racist, etc. I think this came mostly from my father's mother, who was a children's author, and took "bad" children's literature pretty personally :-) Anyway. I've edited the post to say "selected".

It wasn't that the non-approved culture was "forbidden" - I had a Sindy doll, watched TV, read "choose your own adventure" books, etc. - but it wasn't endorsed or encouraged, and some lines were drawn. (I asked Santa Claus for a Girl's World one year - do you remember them? Vile things: plastic female head and shoulders, with make-up and hairbrushes - and got (among other presents) a white football with a note explaining that it was a Boy's Moon.)

[radegund.livejournal.com]

And on the substantive point, oddly enough, there's a sense in which I was allowed to read what I wanted as well - as long as "what I wanted" conformed to the Unwritten Rules. So, for instance, when I was eight or nine I read Lisa: The Story of an Irish Drug Addict, which had some pretty heavy stuff in it (it was years before I worked out what prostitution actually entailed: the descriptions in that chapter of the book weren't detailed enough for me to grasp it at the time). The proscription was less about content and more about form. I think they probably felt that letting me consume "poor" examples of culture would somehow harm me (not to mention a simple reluctance to give me things that they considered trashy). I get the impression that this view was fairly widespread in educated middle-class circles when I was growing up - it probably still is.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I think a large part of the constraint I retrospectively feel comes from the fact that both my parents, for complex reasons, have almost no "mass-culture" tastes themselves. Or at least, none that they care to admit to. Or at least, none that they wouldn't attempt to defend as an academic interest. They don't really do unexamined frivolity.

And now I'm remembering the thrilling moment when my father brought me home LOTR - I'd read The Hobbit and asked for what I presumed was the "sequel", in the mould I was used to from other children's series. (He'd read The Hobbit but not LOTR.) He drew the book out of the bag and presented it to me with great solemnity. It was the biggest book I'd ever seen, and I was scared and excited and awed (and that was before I even opened it...).

[natural20.livejournal.com]

I cannot ever remember being told I couldn't read or experience anything, but that, of course, doesn't mean it wasn't filtered. I am fairly sure both my brother and I were given access to the same bits of mainstream culture as other children of my age, but it was supplimented by other bits and bobs that a lot of other children clearly weren't receiving. For instance, we had lots of toys that involved fighting of one kind or another (He-Man, Transformers, Action Force (later GI Joe) etc.), we read all of the usual comics (Beano, Dandy, Wizzer & Chips, the late lamented Oink) and watched a whole variety of stuff on TV. However we were also pointed at the encyclopedias on the shelf, there were always books around, lots of them and Enid Blyton was considered suitable literature, along with lots of other classic children's books. When we expressed an interest in something we were generally encouraged and despite the fact this now leads to my mother teasingly lamenting my continued interest in roleplaying games I don't think there was ever anything that they balked at.

If there was something that we asked about, or something that we saw, or an opinion that we expressed that didn't fall in line with what my parents believed was correct then the reactions varied. On some occasions it was as if we were being naughty (this is largely in relation to my very naive inital views on Irish nationalism, which occured at an age somewhat older than O is now), but on most other occasions we discussed it and we were suitably discouraged.

Of course it should also be mentioned that my mother's teachings were fairly strongly influenced by Christian morality. So were my father's, but he was more subtle about it. Not that I think this is necessary at all, but I wanted to mention it for context.

One other point, my mother has never, even since day one when I was two, allowed toy weapons at her playgroup.

So yes, I'm rambling, in short, no filters that I'm aware of and if there were any hidden ones, they were *very* hidden.

[stellanova.livejournal.com]

We had no Barbies, few baby dolls and definitely no guns or weapon related toys, but we were always allowed to read whatever we wanted. My dad did have a similar experience to you and Thomas - when I was quite small we found some kitschy old "lives of the saints" books that had belonged to my mum as a kid and because one the saints was Saint Jennifer (my sister's name), Jenny demanded that my (very liberal Catholic) dad read it to us as a bedtime story. When God struck Jennifer's mother blind for not going to Mass, my dad stopped reading and more or less said that he didn't believe God did things like that and that he wasn't going to read a story that said so. And that was it. We did have Enid Blyton, but my parents did encourage us to examine how sexist and racist they were, and I really enjoyed them when I was little despite realising that some of the attitudes expressed therein were pretty vile. We had quite a few rather cool '70s progressive picture books and stuff, and once we were choosing books for ourselves we could get what we wanted - although I think that if we'd ever actually seriously wanted to get a Sweet Valley High book my mother would have been very reluctant to buy them for us (once my sisters and I realised how awesomely but unintentionally hilarious they were, in our mid-teens, they never objected to us filling up the house with charity shop copies).

TV was confined to an hour or so of Children's BBC or whatever between about four or five; I saw very few, if any, grown-up programmes when I was a kid (I remember seeing an episode of Cagney and Lacey when I was about ten and feeling very grown up). Music was a constant, from the Byrds and the incredible String Band to Debussy and Puccini; my dad still buys music magazines like The Word and Uncut. My parents had pretty much the same attitude as me to mainstream popular culture - there's loads of crap, but there's loads of fantastic stuff as well; you've got to pick carefully, but if you dimiss it all you miss out.

[merryhouse.livejournal.com]

ha! When I was seven I was into Jean Plaidy (several of her books started off with the main protagonist as a small girl) and read, among other things, about Charles II's relationship with Lucy Walters. It involved babies being born and so on but I don't remember being at all curious about the sex. I *do* remember Lucy in Paris about to die being afflicted with the problem that comes to "most people who have lived her way of life" and coming away with a vague feeling that she was completely worn out with all the travelling ;-)

We had a definite culture of No Pop Music because my dad hates it (he doesn't like jazz, either) - the first pop record in our house was Karma Chameleon, at which point my eldest sister was 21.

We had Enid Blyton, but not many of the ff/ss series, and watched the occasional film including some Disney - and several of the Carry Ons, so you see my parents' taste was not particularly highbrow to begin with.

We didn't have a television, so I don't know what the stance on Grange Hill would have been. I suspect it would have been not allowed, though I may be wronging them.

My mother did confiscate the Jilly Cooper she found me reading when I was 13. We were allowed to read the Jackie magazines passed on from next door when I was 12, and later to buy our own with our paper-round money. Oh, and I wasn't allowed to take out a biography of Lord Byron I found in the library (I was into Georgette Heyer by then) - the librarian who was a near neighbour looked at it and said "I don't think your mother would like you to have this". They steered me towards a biography of someone else instead (can't remember whose because I didn't read it).

I don't have a daughter [bah] but would definitely *not* buy (or allow anyone else to buy) her a Barbie, never mind a Bratz.

I suspect the aversion to "poor" examples is less that they might do active harm and more that it's a waste of time that could be spent on something useful, there being only a finite amount of time available (I could wish that I'd been dragged off Chalet School a couple of years earlier, for example - and that's quite well-crafted).

[pleidhce.livejournal.com]

It's a difficult one, but you know in the end, there is no clear relationship, culturally, for children, between what goes in and what comes out. In a sense, culture is by definition something you are part of beyond your parents' home, that contains good things and bad things, things you like and things you don't. I remember my parents laughing at how snobbish Enid Blyton books were while cheerfully buying them for me, since I loved them so much. I was fed on a diet of carefully chosen and "improving" books, but ideology almost never entered into it, and my own tastes and fads were largely indulged, occasionally when I was older with a caveat attached (often to do with the representation of class). I was warned when reading the Bagthorpes for example, a totally indulged taste of mine, that the portrayal of Mrs Fosdyke the housekeeper had a touch of condescension about it. But most important of all, contact with culture is just that, contact; it's not the same as indoctrination. Even if it were a good idea to shield Oisin from all things you don't approve of, it would be impossible, and I do think in any case that exposure may well have an important inoculating function. Would it REALLY be better, I wonder, for that whole part of the world you don't like to come as a belated surprise to O.? Children are voracious consumers of culture, and what they get out of it and see in it is anyway so different from what we do. So the Princess in The Princess and the Pea is an spoilt brat of an aristocrat -- what registers with the child listener is some other, unpredictable facet of the story, or image, or concern.

The idea that cultural artifacts must have a propagandic function, and transmit a (possibly coded or hidden) political message, is an attractive but wrong one, I think; and no more so than in the case of children, who need to have a wide-ranging contact with Culture, and whose systems of digesting and understanding it are so different from ours.

Thanks so much for text, am going away for 5 days on Wed, more news to follow ... xxx

[biascut.livejournal.com]

(My first encounter with the idea of prostitution was on Jesus of Nazareth, where you see someone leaving Mary Magdalene's house in the morning and handing her a purse of money. FOR YEARS I thought running a B&B was a mortal sin.

I also remember, age 8, leaning over during the Gospel to ask the lady sat next to me in Choir, "What's adultery?" Poor thing!)

[sshi.livejournal.com]

Heh, I can see the personal angle there :> The most commentary about Blyton that I remember is some possible snarky comments about 'lashings and lashings of ginger beer', etc. I do remember thinking that Ann was particularly wet, mind you, and that the Secret Seven had more interesting girls.

And, yes, I remember those awful heads with growing hair, although I didn't remember the name (I *like* the Boy's Moon, though!) I think my sister had one, which had a rather short life span due to an experiment to see just how many times you could cut the hair before it ran out - I think that there was some way of making the hair grow again, which was promptly mercilessly abused.

To be honest, I'd agree that it's unrealistic to think that you can rigidly control what children are going to see or read, particularly once they get older, but you *can* discuss it with them and highlight any particularly hideous examples of unethical or unrealistic behaviour. I'm sure that a lot of that goes on which isn't remembered by the child, but does have an influence on their outlook as they grow up. After all, aren't parents *supposed* to be instilling values and ethics systems into their offspring? I don't see why expressing approval for recycling trucks is any different from teaching them not to hit smaller people, for example.

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

Gah, baby is stirring. I have many thoughts and a daughter to young for them to be anything other than theories. However, I think I have the right not to give my child things that make me unhappy. If O were older I'd suggest not reading the story, telling him why but leaving it for K to read if she chose. But he's probably too young for that to work.

I ... edit. some aggressively pink presents have been donated, I also donated the bible story book she got from the playgroup her childminder brings her too. And some passed on books about cars never made her bookcase either.

I have a counter question. Do you think others who buy presents for your kid should feel restircted by your rules? I'd be upset if A was bought a Barbie, for example. But on the other hand, other people buying non-parental gifts was definitely a pleasure of childhood.

[ailbhe]

Niamh asked for a Girls World the year my parents split up - split after 1st November, Christmas 25 December - and mum got her a cheap imitation. Dad got her the real thing.

I have vivid memories of what a Girls World looks like and I loathe them with unnatural passion.

That said, Mum was pretty cautious about what she brought into the house for us, and did confiscate books - Flowers in the Attic and Tarry Flynn spring to mind - when she thought they didn't have enough merit-to-ickiness. I mean, I read the whole Seek The Fair Land trilogy when I was 8, with parental blessing, but had Flowers in the Attic confiscated when I was 13.

We had telly but only RTE.

We had Barbies, but mainly because Mum knew that in our hands Barbies were space explorers and so on, rather than shopaholics. And the neighbours kept giving them to us.

Mum tried to balance good influence, protecting against bad influence, and allowing us to develop our own individual tastes. Given that none of the five of us has serious overlap in our literary tastes, and although mine overlaps with mum's to a great extent I don't touch her favourite genre, I think she did ok.

But it's common knowledge that I think my mother is God. (When I was in my very early teens Grainne was horrified to see me reading the book of the film Spartacus. Mum reassured her that I *knew* it was trash, it was just that I was reading it *anyway*.)

Also, Artist, Teacher/Dancer, Archaeologist, Career Parent, Childcare Wossname. Mum would have loved even *one* botanist, or clothes designer. Even on an amateur level.

[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.

[leedy.livejournal.com]

no Barbies

...though we did have some Sindies, who mainly participated in ever-more-exciting Drama-Filled Adventures (as did the Lego people, but never in the same adventures), or were subject to Fashion Experiments (radical haircuts, ear-piercing with pins, home-made attire).

[leedy.livejournal.com]

FOR YEARS I thought running a B&B was a mortal sin.

Ahahahahahahaha!

[stellanova.livejournal.com]

Jungle Sindies! In the crabapple tree in the back garden. They were originally bought for you, weren't they? The parents never got us any more of them after that. They lasted a long time, though.

The Lego people did indeed have much more complex adventures (remember Jenny's and my Halley's village, over which Halley's comet, in the form of a duplo brick with a string through it, whirled every day?). And of course the wonderfully named Mr Shkipom-de-bo....

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

Toy guns are just horrific.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Does anyone play what they're supposed to with Barbies and Sindys? My Sindy had the role of The Flower Fairies' Mother, and I don't think she did anything much apart from come and tell them off occasionally. And Skipper was the Flower Fairies' older sister, and WILDLY JEALOUS because they all had busts and she didn't. There was a toddler in the family, too, though I can't remember what Cultural Icon that was.

The Flower Fairies mostly went rock-climbing up the chest of drawers (except the one who was disabled, because I got her first when I was quite young and chewed one of her feet off. Erm. The others always had to go slow for her.) And had clothes made for them.

[ailbhe]

The next door neighbours, from whom we acquired most of our Barbies, played shopping, dating, kissing, and Going to the Cinema with their Barbies.

Later, we all played sex, of course.

[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.

[merryhouse.livejournal.com]

oooh, I *really* wanted a Girl's World when I was 10. [I was Such a girlie.] I didn't even bother to mention it though, because I must have assumed that it wasn't on the approved list.

Whether this was because it was hideously expensive for such a piece of plastic tat, or because it all tied in with the disapproval of modernity, I'm not sure.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Oh, I just _love_ the "if you approve, you're wrong, and if you don't approve, you're also wrong" dynamic, don't you?

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

I am sorry to have to tell you that Sindy harassed and on occasion raped Barbie in our house. Possibly my mother should have censored my reading far more heavily.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

We had a long conversation about this last night on foot of this post! In general, I think I tend to your idea that you have a right to censor material that distresses you , especially seeing you have to read it to O. at present!

My mother always claimed that, when she was fourteen, her mother put her on a brisk programme of Great European Classics, making her read an Improving Novel a week and give her a report at the end of it. She claims that, as a result, she has never since voluntarily read a work of high literature. That's the one thing that I really would fear in introducing my children to culture: being so ideological or pushy about it that I gave them a life-long hatred of whatever I was pushing. Music was also a little too over-valued in our house - it was surrounded by perfectionist standards, mandatory silence while it was being played, and a certain religious reverence. I'm sure this reverence contributed to my refusal to learn the piano when I was six. And I would hate to pass on that tension and ppushiness to any children I came into contact with.