Baby Lola and Violence

Now I’m a very honest young man and I won’t lie when I say I completely missed National Media Education Week (gotta love tonsillitis). I’m probably not the only one, so I won’t sit here and bullshit how I did and how it was so much fun and how I cant wait till next November to do it all over again, because we’re grown adults and I’ll lay you the truth. I visited their website though and found a lot of neat things. Under their activities it displayed several things you can teach young kids about Media. One that stuck out to me was violence. I have a little five year old sister back at home that calls me almost every night simply just to say hello since she’s figured out that holding down the number one key on my fathers cell phone speed dials her to me. This past weekend I sat down with her to watch some of her favorite cartoons. After watching several Popeye the Sailor episodes I asked her if she knew what the word violence meant. She said no, and I wasn’t too surprised considering she’s only five. Though when I asked her what the word death meant she said yes. She carried on a story how Popeye dies almost every time before he eats the spinach. Now, the media education website goes into a lot of detail as to what you should talk to your kids about in terms of violence, but my sister wouldn’t understand half the stuff they suggested. So instead, I carried a little small talk with her as to what violence is. I told her how anger could turn into violence and the consequences she would face. I explained how the violence she sees in cartoons is not acceptable in her everyday life because cartoons are make belief, and when someone in her cartoon gets hurt, it might be funny in the cartoon, but not in real life. Even though it might sound that this conversation was a scholarly discussion, it lasted probably less then five minutes due to her small attention span, but I did get her to promise not to act like they do in her cartoons, and to explain to me what violence was. She got the gist of it.