As a parent one of our concerns is what our children are exposed to, especially in the internet age. It’s no longer just what they see, or allowed to see, on TV, but the availability of just about everything, good and bad, on websites is a cause for concern. Even the most tolerant of parents are, or at least should be, concerned about what their children are exposed to.
I’m not different.
From an early age SO (my wife) and I have tried to expose our son to what we feel are positive messages. We watched educational and entertaining programs on TV and DVDs and of course in this age quite a few videos on youtube.
As J’s grown he’s had more freedom to explore what he likes to watch, supervised of course, on TV and youtube. And mostly we’ve been happy with his choices.
There have been a few I didn’t want him to watch, and some I stop him from watching. If you’re familiar with the Let’s Play style of videos, you’ll kow the type of videos I mean. We stop him from watching those that swear to much or display abhorent beliefs (eg. hatred for the sake of hating). And tolerate the videos from people who are, with no better way to describe them, complete morons. You know the ones, the ones who obviously didn’t graduate high school and possibly didn’t even finish primary (elementary) school. Thankfully, he quickly realised that even at 5 years of age he was already smarter than them, and stopped watching them of his own accord.
This story though isn’t about Let’s Players, but about a cartoon that is available on youtube, Barbie Life in the Dream House. I won’t link to the youtube videos here since I’m not sure about the copyright situation with the full videos that are on youtube, but you can see them at the link at the end of this article.
Now, I know what a lot of you are thinking. A father who doesn’t want his son watching a video that’s made for girls, right? Especially after I wrote in the title that it almost killed me.
But here’s the thing, I didn’t mind J watching them. I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing them and thought that they would be stupid and a waste of time. Especially when there are a lot of better and more educational cartoons available there (do a search for “kids health how the body works”) that we could watch. I didn’t even consider the gender thing until my wife made a comment about it.
J did convince me to give them a try though and so I sat down to watch them with him. And I enjoyed them. Yes, shocking I know, how can a grown man enjoy a cartoon made for little girls, right? But here’s the thing. They might appear to be for kids, they are after all about a girl’s doll, but there’s a lot of humour thrown in there for adults to. Most of which my son hasn’t gotten yet, but there’s enough kid’s jokes in there that he gets that he enjoys watching.
So how did it almost kill me? If you’ve ever watched something funny with a kid, especially one you have a special bond with, then you’ll know how infectious laughter can be. There’s been more than one occasion when I’ve been sitting with my son watching these cartoons that we’ve been laughing so hard we haven’t been able to see because of the tears in our eyes, and unable to breath. Quite often we’ve had to rewatch the episode because we didn’t know what happend in the second half of the video.
If you’ve got young children and have a sense of humour, I recommend checking the videos out here.
