MOVIE VIOLENCE

Joey LOVES The Avengers ... and she's never even seen the movie. 
She has since bits of 70's style cartoons, and she's seen all the stuff surrounding this movie and has fallen in love with super heroes. Especially girl super heroes. Ask her who she wants to be, and most of the time her answer is Black Widow. Or Iron Girl (She made that one up herself.)


So this led Mark and I to have to make the decision of when she was old enough for that level of movie violence. 


Where do you draw the line? 
Bambi's mother being shot off screen?
Scar throwing Mufasa off a cliff? (You get to see that one.)


Joey is a very observant, empathic, and smart 3 1/2 year old. 
And, more importantly, I argued that super hero movies make the perfect introduction to movie violence becuase there is a clear good and evil, just like in Disney movies. There is a bad man who must be stopped and the good guy only uses violence to stop the bad man from hurting more people. 
It's not like we are showing her Rocky, for which there is absolutely no excuse. 
Plus, they are more obviously pretend. Not real. 


So Mark ok'd the The Avengers. (But, being the movie geeks that we are, we didn't just take her to see it.) She has to understand the backstory. So we started with Iron Man and are working are way through the movies that lead into The Avengers. We are watching them on DVD, at home, and with lots of pausing for explanation and discussion about what she is seeing. 


I love getting a glimpse into her brilliant little mind, by hearing the questions she asks. I know there is a cliche about little children and their never ending questions. But honestly, I enjoy the philosophical debate. (Where is heaven, and why is the sky blue, after all?) And besides Chris, very few people will have  a conversation with me about whether you call it Coke, Soda or Pop... for example. 


I, like my father, basically had children so I would have someone to play with.