"It's just TV, Mom!"

How to politically complicate kid's media without ruining their lives.

Hi friends!

Tomorrow is April. Flowers are blooming in Brooklyn. We hired a nanny for 15 beautiful hours a week to look after Maisie. I’m running a 10-day writing workshop that will help me get focused on my book again (I hope! You can join too - it’s free! See here). Spring is good here.

I’ve seen a lot of parents asking lately how to explain the concept of war to their kids. I thought initially I would write about that today, but I…just don’t know how you explain it in a way that does justice to the topic. I’m still thinking. So for now, I wanted to write about how I talk to my kids about the politics of the media they consume without ruining their lives.

We had a policy to not allow Cyrus any screen time until he was two, which we did a pretty good job of sticking to. Alma and Maisie have experienced…somewhat more lax screen time policies. Whatever your orientation toward your kids and tv is, I get it, and I’m with you. Whether your kids watch one hour a week or twenty, media that kids consume - tv, movies, books, video games - have a political orientation and value system embedded. It’s worth being nosey about it and helping your kids decode what they’re watching (and also, it’s worth leaving them alone so that you can have a conversation with your spouse or cook dinner or go to the bathroom without anyone following you).

No thank you, Paw Patrol

I try really hard to stay away from intervening in shows that I just find annoying, rather than problematic, both because I want my kids to develop their own taste in art, and mostly because I don’t want them spite-watching things that annoy me. So while I’ll occasionally make comments under my breath about how Daniel Tiger is killing my soul, I try to stay in my lane.

Pretty early on, I started nixing shows that trained my kids to be middle management - shows about obedience to authority and following rules. Peace out, Bob the Builder! None for us, Thomas the Train! Programming children to be good little automatons wasn’t working for me. Equally, we avoided shows that glorified police and the military. No thank you, Paw Patrol! I wanted to be able to introduce the topic of police violence on my terms, and without having to fight against the valorization of the profession (this has resulted in strange situations I’ve written about before).

And it’s hard to explain to kids! This might have been a real conversation in our house: “Mama, why can’t I watch Thomas? I love trains! I want to be a tank engine when I grow up!” “Because the show is overly disciplinarian. Read some Foucault.” It doesn’t really land with your average 3-year-old. But as I watched my kids role play everything from Peppa Pig to Octonauts, I saw that they emulate not just the characters but the tenor of relationships and power dynamics. They internalize the logic of these shows.

Rejecting racist ponies

Recently, Cyrus and Alma became hooked on the reboot of My Little Pony. Y’all. This show. It’s just so bad.

One morning, it was raining. I was doomscrolling Twitter. The kids were glued to MLP. And this episode came on. The plot dwells on the conflict between the feather-and-war-paint-wearing Buffalo herd and the civilized, though short sighted, settlers of Appleoosa, an old West style town with an apple orchard that is planted on the land of the buffalo herd. The buffalo herd stampedes a train, and then prepares to go to war against the settlers. The details escape me, but the episode is racist AF. Really - it’s on Netflix. Go watch it, and come back.

As I put down my phone to process what was going on, I realized I had to decode it with them, to help them see why this kind of representation was problematic. And these conversations are hard! Alma was there for the flying ponies, and had no interest in what the buffalo or settler ponies were meant to represent. As I’ve written about before, I am always weary about pointing to racism in ways that reinforce or introduce stereotypes for the first time. But here, it was worth forcing the conversation. Who is portrayed as “rational” in the show? Who is “emotional?” Why do the ponies need to intervene - who is depicted as incapable of managing their own affairs? Why are the ponies the same race as the settlers - how does that make the buffalo seem like outsiders (and more animalistic?)

I won’t say the kids loved this conversation, but it set up an expectation that media can’t (always) just be passively consumed in our house. We’re going to interrogate it, talk about what we see. And I hid MLP from our Netflix menu.

… They get it too.

Cyrus and I are reading the third book in the Morrigan Crow series (if you’re looking for a series that is Harry Potter-adjacent, I highly recommend this one). The book is about a virus that infects only one species of creatures in the country of Nevermoor, and how society deals with it. Cyrus has seen tons of parallels with the pandemic, which we’ve talked about as we’ve made our way through the book. Toward the end of the book, the prime minister starts to arrest and restrict travel of the creatures affected by this virus, and so humans start to protest, which leads to a city-wide lockdown.

“Wow, that’s mean.” Cyrus commented.

“Yup…preventing people from protesting is a pretty awful thing for a government to do,” I replied.

Cyrus: “It’s not very democratic is it?” Y’all, tears of joy.

Me: “No. Protesting is what the first amendment is all about - you need to be able to criticize your government without being punished.”

Cyrus: “The prime minister of Nevermoor is kind of like Putin, locking up and pepperspraying all of those protestors on the news.”

Me: “Exactly! Putin blah blah authoritarianism blah blah blah…”

Cyrus: “Read, Mom!”

My point is - they see the parallels too. They can read for the nuance, and understand that all art is in some way political. It doesn’t mean we always have to engage in these conversations - sometimes a show can just be a show and a book can just be a book - but the invitation to talk about the subtext and implications should be there. And although I’m pretty anti-censorship, I’m very pro-cultivating the type of media consumption experience my young children have.

Have a good week, friends. As always, if you have ideas for what I should write about, or if you have a particularly interesting political conversation with your kids, let me know!