Too Much Princess
We have a little friend, Jack, who loves when his parents come to our house for dinner because he almost always gets to pick a movie from the kid shelf and watch it in our bedroom. A few weeks ago, he came over and chose “The Little Mermaid.” Because Signe is just about old enough to spend time alone with a boy in a bedroom, we let the two of them watch the movie together.
Bad idea. My darling daughter is now hooked on Disney.
After that fateful night a few weeks ago, we have watched “The Little Mermaid” every day. I was losing my mind a little and decided to try some other movies she might like. “Finding Nemo” wasn’t the slam dunk I thought it would be. “Monsters, Inc.” did nothing for her. We even tried “Snow White,” which she liked, but she would exclaim “This is scary!” about every two minutes while watching it.
So GTB and I did what every sanity-seeking parent would do: we went to Best Buy and bought four new movies. “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Princess and the Frog,” “Mulan,” and “Mickey’s Magical Christmas” now sit happily on our shelf and our good intentions have turned our two-year-old into a TV tyrant.
Keeping in mind that someone Sig’s age isn’t supposed to watch more than two hours of TV, we let Signe watch “The Little Mermaid,” “Mickey’s Magical Christmas,” and “Mulan,” yesterday, and she cried when we turned the TV off. The first thing she said to me this morning was “Watch Little Mermaid?” Each “No!” (there were several of them) was met with tears. She’s spending the day in daycare, which is sans TV, thank goodness, and I’m seriously considering a weekday ban on all television.
I have such mixed emotions about the whole thing. For one, Signe is super smart and I’m not terribly worried that TV is gonna make her suddenly stupid. But I do want her to play, use her imagination, and learn to be creative. There are worse things she could be watching than “Mulan,” which I happen to think is a pretty decent movie for Disney. I mean, (SPOILER ALERT) Mulan dresses like a boy, goes to war, and kicks total ass. I’m OK with Sig looking up to that role model. On the other hand, Mulan is one of the Disney “Princesses” and I have trepidation about the whole princess thing for little girls. Then again, if you ask Signe if she is a princess, she says, “No, I’m a monkey.”
So, what do you think? Am I ruining my kid by letting her watch Disney movies, or TV at all? Will she grow up thinking she needs a prince (or fellow princess; I’m open minded) to save her. Will this much exposure to screen time give her ADHD? Now that I’ve opened that Pandora’s box, how do I close it?
November 9th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
I’m experiencing a bit of this too, with Max he watches short episodes of the Monkey King (a cartoon in Mandarin) every once in a while. He asks for it by singing the theme song, but I just say no…and suggest something else that’s really really fun! Sometimes we get into a “no/yes/no/yes” game where I modulate my tone and copy him and he thinks this is really funny and it’s enough to distract him. Maybe if you had a video with Little Mermaid in shorter snippets, like 15 minutes, she could watch one episode and then you could explain it’s “all done!” and move onto something else.