There’s so much tween ‘empowerment’ on TV. I’d rather my kids watched Sharknado
My parents were having a dinner party and I was allowed to stay up, left unattended in front of the TV. This was long before TV-ondemand, when children’s programming aired only on Saturday mornings and for a few hours after school and, as a result, my memory of what I watched is retrievably sharp. This was the era of Why Don’t You? and Danger Mouse and, going back further, prehistoric-looking Bagpuss and King Rollo, all seared into my brain with the force of the novelty that kids’ TV shows still were. My clearest screen memory, however, aside from an image of Mr Benn that I assume will outlast all others, is those two hours I spent, at the age of nine, alone in front of Psycho II.
Consensus around graphic sex and violence aside, definitions of “unsuitable for children” change with the times, and of course vary hugely according to household. My parents were liberal. I had no bedtime at weekends and, if I stayed very quiet, could often stretch out school nights to past 8pm, in the process grabbing 20 minutes of Dallas or Dynasty. These shows were adult only in the technical sense, their cartoonishness ruining the feeling you were getting something illicit. The news was a bore. Most comedy was incomprehensible. Over the course of my childhood, I remember only two occasions when my mother bolted from her chair to change channel: when a drama about the second world war took a sudden torturey turn; and at the sight – this must’ve been very early Channel 4, surely – of two men kissing.
Nazis and gays may remain on the banned list for many parents today. It is hard for me to discern, looking back, whether I remember those scenes with such clarity because they were age-inappropriate or because of my mother’s response to them, although in the case of the gays I’m pretty sure it was the latter. Harder still is trying to figure out where to draw the line in my own household, now that I have impressionable six-year-olds with their own iPads. No matter how many filters I try to set up, they have access, every time they switch on, to images it would have been unthinkable to put before kids 30 years ago.
The triggers for me aren’t blood and guts, which most kids love and which I’ve always figured are fine, if they’re sufficiently ridiculous. I don’t mean Hellraiser, or Saw. But I did let my kids watch Jaws when they were five, which they found 90% tedious and 10% scary, because of the music, and which they soon shoved aside in favour of, in their view, two vastly superior titles, Sharknado and 5 Headed Shark Attack.
More concerning to me is the teen and tween garbage mill that pumps out ostensibly age-appropriate drama and threatens to interfere with the development of self-image. These shows sell a version of empowerment that makes me shudder. Both my children, at one point or another, have parroted the phrase “Believe in yourself !” – which is, of course, fine on the surface. In the context of shows in which, to have value, that “self” must be thin, pretty, straight and popular, is chilling, however. I’d rather they watched someone lose his legs to a shark than be gaslighted with the ideology that success is solely a function of mindset.
I have made some mistakes. We talk about freak accidents a lot in my house and read a lot of books about natural disasters. My kids love A Day in Pompeii, the amazing eight-minute video created by an Australian animation studio that recreates, with violent intensity, Vesuvius erupting. They were early to obsession with the Titanic. We did a lot of time on the Hindenburg. I don’t know how it came up, but one day I found myself telling them the based-on-real-events outline of the movie 127 Hours, in which James Franco spends five nights in the wilderness with his arm stuck under a rock. They were totally fascinated.
You see where this is going. I should’ve rewatched the movie, which I hadn’t seen since its release 10 years ago. From memory, I thought the bit where he cuts his arm off was 30 seconds I could fast forward through, in a movie that was otherwise interesting, visually stunning and a useful lesson in not going hiking alone. Anyway, that backfired: the build-up was too powerful; the implications too scary; and although everyone was interested in the technicalities of how one might saw through two bones in one’s arm, there were nightmares afterwards. Oops.
Perhaps, 40 years from now, my children will remember watching 127 Hours when they were too young to absorb it. But I also assume it won’t unduly scar them. The day after watching, slack-jawed, as Norman Bates chased a pair of teens round his basement with a cleaver, I took my astonished findings to the playground. We played Psycho II, quite happily, for weeks.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist