How to deal with 'problematic' older media that hasn't aged so well?

[Skalpadda]

I’m hardly an expert on child rearing or child psychology, but I spent a couple of years working as a preschool teacher (mostly ages 4-6) and among over a hundred kids I met and spent 8 hours per day with I only ever saw one instance of racism and it was a boy clearly aping stuff his parents had said.

I don’t think you need to worry overly much. Parents, friends and other real life people around them will be what informs most of their world view. Give them positive examples as well and try to be a good role model. Seeing an instance of prejudice won’t immediately ruin their understanding of the world and turn them prejudiced.

You can highlight it and try to use it as an opportunity to explain how things have changed, but then you run the risk of introducing kids to negative ideas that they might otherwise not have even considered. But then if you don’t highlight it maybe that will cause them to absorb the negative ideas through osmosis.

I don’t know how old your kids are, but there will be plenty of opportunities to talk about this stuff naturally along the way. Also I don’t think you should be scared to do so because of the risk of introducing the ideas to them. It’s perfectly understandable to want to shield children from bad things, but complete ignorance isn’t a shield to prejudice, quite the opposite.

Not saying you should sit down with 4-year olds and hold detailed lectures about the horrors of the Holocaust or slavery, but you can definitely talk about prejudices in terms of fairness and how people should have equal opportunities in life.

[Similar]

I’m hardly an expert on child rearing or child psychology, but I spent a couple of years working as a preschool teacher (mostly ages 4-6) and among over a hundred kids I met and spent 8 hours per day with I only ever saw one instance of racism and it was a boy clearly aping stuff his parents had said.

I don’t think you need to worry overly much. Parents, friends and other real life people around them will be what informs most of their world view. Give them positive examples as well and try to be a good role model. Seeing an instance of prejudice won’t immediately ruin their understanding of the world and turn them prejudiced.

I’ve been thinking about this too. I was a kid in the seventies and things were … less complicated, at least as a generic white Danish kid. We had one TV channel, so choice was limited, and I watched Westerns and Tarzan and whatever else my parents felt was appropriate. I don’t remember my parents ever discussed what we saw, i.e. there was no direct counterweight to the portrayals of American Indians as murderous savages and Black Africans as primitives (although, as I remember it, usually the Really Evil people in the old Tarzan movies were typically white), and yet I’ve never for a second, at any age, believed there was any truth to the way things were presented in those movies.
I assume the counterweight was just my general upbringing; I am fortunate enough to have lovely parents. They’ve always just kind of lead by example, and I don’t think I could have had a better upbringing than that (I
think they also, in some way, gave me an urge to figure out how much of something I watched was actually true, so I’ve spent a lot of time looking up stuff in libraries. Which of course got a lot easier after the Internet became a thing).

And yeah, I heard my first racist comment around seventh grade (coincidentally from a kid who also uttered the first sexist comment I ever heard), from a dumb little shit who was definitely repeating what he’d heard his parents say.
I think we were generally very much unaffected by media, at least negatively, despite quite a lot of the kids in my class not having very bright parents.

Of course, there was a hell of a lot less media at the time too, so perhaps it’s a bit difficult to compare with now (I didn’t have phone until I was 27 and that was landline, just to give an example, and it didn’t have one of these newfangled screens, either), but I still think upbringing will win out.

[alms]

21 posts were split to a new topic.

[Det.Bullock]

Re: Transformers specifically, I suspect that even if a kid has never really heard of them or whatever, seeing the actual cartoon movie from the 1980s might actually be fun, just as a standalone, because it’s so weird and intense. Whereas the godawful TV series cartoons are worse than what small children watch today in terms of writing, and badly animated, so probably not worth suggesting.

Cyberverse (or “Transformerse Cyberverse Bumblebee Adventures” after the rebrand even though there are entire stretches without Bumblebee but Hasbro gotta Hasbro) I think is actually a better way to introduce modern kids to Transformers as:
1- it’s better than the original G1 cartoon in every possible way (low bar I know);
2- has more female Transformers having actually speaking roles in both factions;
3- is actually aimed at kids so the nerdy stuff usually doesn’t confuse newcomers and knows it has to be a bit goofy and fun;
4- despite that it’s not overly sanitized and knows when to be violent or scary.

[Zephro]

But does it have 5 small robots making 1 big robot? Which is more important than anything else.

It’s also acceptable to have 5 normal sized robot make 1 giant robot.

[Vheissu]

I’m a huge fan of the animated movie. It was Orson Welles’ last performance! and it had Eric Idle and Leonard Nimoy! It was also a pretty dark story with a lot of death.

I don’t know what Hasbro was thinking. It’s certainly not something I would show a child. Although it does have 5 robots combining into one.

Also, LexW you infinitely more patience than I do. Good reading though! It’s kinda fascinating how our modern conception of slavery has been warped by what became the US (and plantations offshore in the same period). Not that slavery ever was a good thing, but it’s a particularly despicable form that emerged in that time.

[Zephro]

I dunno I watched it when I was 5 years old, I felt I learnt a lot about tragedy from watching Optimus Prime die. I would definitely recommend it for children. It’ll set them up for Shakespeare later on.

[DeekyFun]

It’s also useful for learning the Universal Greeting, which has helped me navigate many a potentially perilous encounter on the mean streets of the Chiltern Hills. Never leave home without it, kids!

[Det.Bullock]

But does it have 5 small robots making 1 big robot? Which is more important than anything else.

It’s also acceptable to have 5 normal sized robot make 1 giant robot.

Strangely enough there have been no combiners in cartoons lately except for the awful Prime Wars Trilogy (which is NOT Transformers Prime because Hasbro loves to make things confusing) which started with Combiner Wars but since it’s aimed at nostalgic adults you never see them combine because it’s assumed you know what a Devastator or a Menasor is.

I’m a huge fan of the animated movie. It was Orson Welles’ last performance! and it had Eric Idle and Leonard Nimoy! It was also a pretty dark story with a lot of death.

I don’t know what Hasbro was thinking. It’s certainly not something I would show a child. Although it does have 5 robots combining into one.

Also, LexW you infinitely more patience than I do. Good reading though! It’s kinda fascinating how our modern conception of slavery has been warped by what became the US (and plantations offshore in the same period). Not that slavery ever was a good thing, but it’s a particularly despicable form that emerged in that time.

Personally after the few G1 episodes I have rewatched as an adult I never had the courage to sit through the entire thing (which I was spared when I was a child because it was the tail end of the G1 era and reruns were completely random so I didn’t even see the version split in episodes), I love the soundtrack though. I had heard the songs quoted multiple times in various nerd stuff for years without knowing they were for the TF movie (which means that the Boss and Zenyak quoting Optimus Prime and Megatron almost word for word in the finale of Saints Row 4 was completely lost on me the first time I played it).

Hasbro really underestimated how much children latched on to the cartoon compared to the toys, to them it was just getting rid of the old toys to sell new ones

[BillButNotBen]

Woah. This thread has taken off I wrote a whole long post but didn’t have time to finish it, but now it seems out of date, so I’ll start again.

I think we can all agree that racism is bad, and the past was racist, and racism is still a thing now. My conundrum is how to approach that past racism (and sexism, and other isms) which is prevalent in a wide range of older media that I’d otherwise consider valuable.

I’m coming at it from 2 viewpoints: As a parent considering the impact of said media on children, and as an adult considering the appropriateness of media that I’d otherwise find enjoyable or culturally important.

I think I consider media for my kids more closely than some, because they’re growing up in Japan and yet I want them to input western media. But western media isn’t widely available here, so I have to go out of my way to look for it, get access to it and put it in front of them.
Possibly if we were in the UK then I wouldn’t need to give this so much thought… they’d just consume whatever was on TV or whatever their mates were consuming.

Actually, while current events have made racism a more visible issue, the main one I’ve been having problems with more regularly has been sexism… or if not always sexism then the general (I would say) dated portrayal of females in lots of media, or their just general absence.
(But I think the same issues apply to racism and similar topics. )

(Eg: I just looked up some lists of top 20 80s kids movies. In 5 lists, the only ones I spotted with main female characters were The Little Mermaid (she gives up her voice to get a man) and Labyrinth (ok!) )

It’s the same with a lot of older kids TV shows, and with classic books. Books tend to separate more clearly into ‘for boys’ or ‘for girls’, though I’m not sure that’s a good thing. But even then, the girls often tend to fall into stereotypical roles (eg cooking, cleaning) and even the ‘girl power’ books / shows tend to be surprisingly often all about how to get the cute boy.

I think the current generation of parents realise it’s an issue, because there’s a large number of books along the lines of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls which actively highlight that women can be great, or can do things like science or politics.
(There’s also the dadification of games, as more and more game developers are dads, who want some games they can play with their daughters which involve something other than being rescued by mario).

But, similar to the Peter Pan Indians conundrum, I wonder if it’s good or bad to introduce the issue. For example, the aforementioned Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is full of stories about how “Despite being told that women couldn’t be xxx, she didn’t give up…”. And I read this to my daughter and I wonder if she’s thinking “Yeah! She didn’t let the men tell her what to do!” or “Oh! Apparently there are lots of things women aren’t allowed to do”.

Given that my daughter is unlikely to ever encounter a Native American, did highlighting the outdated tropes in the movie have any real benefit? Or did it just introduce something negative that she didn’t need to be aware of?
(Maybe she’s a bit too young, but after using it as an opportunity to try and explain the history, she’s now declared that 'Indians sounds much cooler than Native Americans! I’m going to call them that!" and is being awkward about it.)

Also, even considering that a lot of the portrayals of Native American or African or other cultures in older movies are a little iffy, I can’t help but wonder if there’s value in at least encountering other cultures. Before watching Peter Pan, she wasn’t even aware that cultures other than English and Japanese really existed.

Reading some previous comments, I think I do agree that on balance it’s probably better to address the issues than to ignore them, but also maybe that it’s necessary to pick your battles as you can’t address every issue.

Anyway, this has gotten too long and rambling.(and I didn’t even get to part 2!)

[alms]

Woah. This thread has taken off

Yup, and this has happened because a few posters specifically disregarded my invitation to drop the matter and kept adding fuel to the fire.

So now the thread has been cleaned up, everything has been excised, including some OK posts that wouldn’t have had to go, otherwise.

There won’t be other consequences, as long as I’m not given a reason. Let’s not make incidents like this happen again, please.