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Alamb

Author/Television Reporter

Amanda Lamb is a professional television journalist and author. She covers murder trials by day and reads Dora the Explorer to her children at night. Somewhere in between all of that she writes about those parenting moments that catch each us off-guard in a crazy, chaotic, and wonderful way. Aman...

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Reacting to Violence

Amanda Lamb

I took my seven-year-old daughter and her friends to see a play the other day at our local community theatre.  It was a classic tale with a great message about a nice dragon that everyone assumed was mean, so they wanted to slay him.  Ultimately, the villagers learned that the dragon was in fact not a threat to them and they decided not to kill him, even embracing him in the end as a new friend.

The dragon himself was a kindly, massive, puffy  blue and yellow figure who you wanted to hug instead of run from.  But there were swords and there were harsh words.  It made me think about the cartoons of yesteryear where the characters were constantly bashing each other in the head when they weren’t shooting one another.  Yet today we’ve become so sensitive to violence in our television programs, movies and video games.  I started thinking about what has changed.

In general, I don’t let my kids watch anything violent on television or at the movies, and I certainly don’t let them play violent vidoe games.  I try to make sure what they see is age-appropriate as much as I possibly can.  So I started trying to decipher the difference between the play we saw and the material we are so opposed to today as parents.  The answer I came up with is “context.”  Often today programs use violence for shock value, violence that has no real importance to the story line.  Because of this you never know when it’s coming.  You don’t know when to cover little eyes or ears.  It is simply easier not to take the risk.  Not to let them watch at all.

My daughter had no problem understanding or dealing with the scenes that involved violence in the play.  The message at the end of the program was that violence is never the correct answer, but in order to get there some violence had to be displayed.  I was okay with it, but in today’s world unfortunately I think we need to look at everything our kids view on a case-by-case basis.  We are the gatekeepers.