Fear

Once a month LL spends her Friday evening at a women’s dance gathering. The boys and I stay home and watch part of a movie. The boys are 2 and 4. As a family physician I’m well aware of the recommendation to limit screen time, along with the solid evidence between all the other things one could be doing with that time—reading, playing outside, making music, engaging with friends—and better health. Probably more importantly, my own parents raised me without a TV, and we don’t own one. For the occasional movie we set up a projector and screen.

So up until tonight (not counting the Winnie-the-Pooh movies that their Nana and Papa allow them) our boys had seen a total of two movies, both by director Hayao Miyazaki: Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro. Watching a little over half an hour at a time, we’ve seen each film now twice all the way through.

Tonight we decided to branch out and try something different: 2014’s highly acclaimed Song of The Sea.

We made it about 20 minutes in.

At that point we had to stop. Our 4-year-old was terrified. My good friend (not coincidentally, a pediatrician), who lent me the movie and whose 2-year-old loves it, had warned us that there were scary parts. I do not believe we made it to any of the scary parts. My son was crying because the main character and her older brother were being taken away from their father to live with their unsmiling grandmother. Again and again I was asked, “Why was she so mean?”…“Why was she making them do things they didn’t want to?”…and most of all, “Why was she not listening to them?”

Over an hour later—after reassuring, coming up with no less than seventeen possible explanations for why she was so mean, reassuring, watching some of the familiar Totoro, reassuring, brushing teeth, reassuring, pee in the potty, reassuring, reading a story, reassuring, carrying upstairs, reassuring, lights out, reassuring, a long giraffe family story, our repertoire of eight songs, hugs, kisses and gobbles, love sparkles, and more reassuring—I was able to reflect on why this movie had evoked such a strong fear response.

In our family we value listening, empathy, explanation, and love. Equally, we value responsibility, natural limits, community, and helping others. Looking back at the short clip of the movie we saw, the whole thing was terrifying. The little girl who is the central figure is mute. She cannot be heard because she has no voice. Her older brother, to whom she clings, is clearly antagonistic towards her. Her father loves them both, but takes no responsibility in protecting them from a figure who is a caricature of evil. There was no community because they lived alone on an island. I was terrified too! In reading, afterwards, Wikipedia’s plotline, the obvious was stated: of course things get better. Her brother sticks up for her. Her muteness is explained. The family is reunited. Even the grandmother isn’t so bad. I’m familiar with the elements of the Hero’s Journey, and I don’t doubt that the rest of the movie lives up to its reviews. At the same time I understand why it was so scary. Up to the part where we hit “STOP”, there was very little that was not a direct threat to everything we’ve tried to instill in our little guys.

This is not to say that we will never again venture beyond our same safe two Miyazaki films…though I did promise our 4-year-old we’d shelve Song of the Sea for now.

Yet neither is it in any way a cautionary note to self that we’re over-sheltering our kids. There is so much fear and actual horror in the world right now that the last thing I want is to try to numb our boys by exposing them to any significant fraction of the 200,000 acts of onscreen violence the average American child sees by age 18. There is also so much incredible beauty, kindness, selfless heroism, creativity, collaboration and community in this world, and these things tend to get an ever-shrinking amount of our focus, much less media time, beyond the walls of preschool. If our son experienced genuine fear at the depiction of a separation of family, that is a very natural and healthy fear. I feel grateful that he has the vocabulary and courage to express his feelings and ask for what he needed in that moment.

And of the seventeen explanations that I came up with for why the grandmother was so mean, the one my boys liked the best was, “maybe she just didn’t get enough ice cream!” Think I’ll go have some myself so that I never turn into a mean dad.