I'm trying to decide what I think about letting our girls watch fairy tales. We rented "Cinderella" last weekend for girls' night in. (Big Boy and Scott were at a men/boys campout.) Big Girl seemed to enjoy staying up late and watching it with her mommy and aunt. But watching it for the first time since I was little, I was rather disappointed. Maybe it's just that I'm used to the stories written for adults who can analyze and keep up with more complex characters and story lines. I certainly don't want to become one of those isolationist parents who has a long list of seemingly arbitrary don'ts for my kids.
So what could be wrong with Disney's "Cinderella?" It's just a story, a fun little movie with cute songs, cute mice, and a girl who suffers through a rough life and finally escapes in a beautiful happy ending. Where's the harm in that? Three things bothered me about the movie.
1. The main characters are portrayed in very black and white, either/or terms. I guess this could be good and bad. Cinderella is perfectly good. She is beautiful, has no flaws (either physical or in her character), and responds perfectly to all the abuse she gets. In this way, she sets a good example for how to respond to mean people and difficult and undeserved circumstances. But she is so good that she isn't real. Her stepmother and step-sisters are the opposite. They are ugly and totally bad. They are only looking out for themselves and have absolutely no redeeming qualities. Most people aren't wholly bad or wholly good -- they are a confusing and complicated mixture of both. And their physical features have little to do with the kind of people they are. This over-simplification of people's characters, if unaddressed, could lead children to believe that you can just look at person and know if they are good or bad. They could very easily be led astray by someone who "looks" nice and miss some amazing people who don't look nice. I want my children to look past the outside and choose their friends and future spouses by their character, not their appearance or their clothes or their money or whatever fleeting external measure is the fad at the time.
2. The men are laughable. This lack of respect for men is a very strong and consistent trend in entertainment today. Men are buffoons, stupid, self-centered, the butt of all the jokes. Think about every sit-com and most comedic movies made in the last 40 years. Women characters (with the possible exception of blonds) are smart, get to say all the brilliant comebacks, are always right, and if they are made the butt of a joke, always get the last laugh. If women were ever cast in the buffoon role, we'd have a feminist revolt on our hands!
"Cinderella" follows the trend (or leads, since it's an old movie). The king is impetuous, unrealistic, self-centered, impatient, violent-tempered, and abusive. His sidekick, the duke or whatever his title is, has no respect for the king, other than that invoked by fear for his life. He thinks the guy is an idiot and makes fun of him. The prince -- well, we don't know much about him. He has only a couple lines in the movie, so all we can learn is that he seems to be as impetuous as his dad, falling in love and marrying Cinderella after dancing with her for 3 hours.
3. The relationship between Cinderella and Prince Charming is shallow, unrealistic, and moves from initial attraction to marriage in the space of two days (in the real fairy tale, Cinderella goes to three different balls... but that isn't the story Disney chose to tell). "Love at first sight" is the model here. They do not take time to find out what each expects of the other in a husband/wife role, to see if they look at the world from the same point of view, to share dreams of the future to see if those dreams are compatible, to actually disagree and work out that disagreement (if you can't do that, your marriage is doomed!), or to find out what the family dynamics will be. Prince Charming was probably less than thrilled to learn that she had some step-family baggage to deal with when they got back from their fairytale honeymoon!
I digress. I don't want my daughters to think that true love works like this. If they do, they will never have a successful relationship, which means they will experience wrenching pain after wrenching pain. No parent wants this for their child!
So I suppose this could all be remedied by having some good conversations with the kids. They'll need instruction in how to choose friends, keep friends, resolve conflict, respond to ill treatment, and choose a spouse. And maybe a movie with such blatant errors would be a good springboard into some of that conversation. But the ability to engage in that kind of thinking and dialog comes at a later age than my kids are now.
So my dilemma is: Do I let them watch it now because it's fun and they are enjoying the music and silliness, and take the viewing to a deeper level when their maturity level is right? Or do I carefully screen media until they are old enough to think critically about it and talk about it with us? Would doing the latter result in a ridiculous and ultimately un-enforceable policy of "no you can't spend the night at that friend's house because you might end up watching 'Cinderella' without me?"
Ultimately, my responsibility as a parent is to teach my children to think independently and ask these same questions themselves. I cannot be there every moment of every day to point out dangers and prevent them from making mistakes. Part of maturing and becoming an adult is learning to recognize fallacies, fairy tales, and fraud, and learning to respond to this appropriately. How we actually DO this is the difficult part! I have a sneaking suspicion that the method will depend on the individual and their strengths and weaknesses, making it impossible to find one universal answer and apply it to all.
