The Road To Hell

We read the books, the parenting magazines, the websites filled with the opinions of innumerable child psychologists and "experts" and we tell ourselves we will do everything they tell us to do for our little princes and princesses.  After all, we don't want to screw up our kids the way our parents screwed us up, right?  We drive down the road and scowl at those parents who have the DVD players running 24 hours a day in their mini vans and scoff at their clear neglect of their childrens' developing mental capacities.  Until, that is, our child suddenly learns how to employ the most sinister sort of emotional blackmail known to mankind; the tantrum.  Kicking, screaming, writhing, tortured agony that can clearly only be resolved by an hour's worth of brainless Disney movie indoctrination, and we cave don't we?  Of course we do, we are human, and there is only so much choked sobbing, and snot dripping angst that any one good-intentioned parent can handle. 

How, then, do we mitigate the damage?  Great question, and so far the best answer I can come up with is to be sure to pick movies that have characters you approve of.  If, for example, you have an impressionable young girl-child and you don't want her to grow up sighing like Scarlet O'Hara and thinking that a woman's only recourse in times of strife is to find a rich man to save her then you don't put in Sleeping Beauty or Snow White.  Instead try a movie with a strong, smart female character like Rapunzel in Tangled or Tianna in the Princess and the Frog, a couple girls who spend just as much time rescuing the boys as the boys spend getting into trouble!