Why do we let our kids watch princess movies? They’re essentially all love stories, and not the kind of love that any three year old has any business thinking about anyhow. So why do we do it? Is it just because they are classics? Is it because it’s easy?
Disney essentially espouses the Greco-Roman understanding of love…that it is something that happens to you. A man or woman is swept away. They are hit with Cupid’s arrow; they have no choice in the matter. He or she falls in love. There is no stopping it. The adult version of this is that we can fall out of love. There’s no helping it. How can there be– it’s not like any decision or act of will was required when we fell into love?
The Judeo-Christian version of love is that love is an act of the will accompanied by emotion. If the emotion isn’t there, then we choose to act out our love until the emotion re-aligns itself with our actions. Y’all will be surprised to hear this, but sometimes Roman has to choose to love me. Every now and then Roman has to choose not to take offense, not to take things personally. I know y’all are shocked, cause I’m just all that (and a bag of chips).
So am I actually undermining my daughter’s future (if she chooses to marry) or making those first marriage years an uphill battle by showing her these films? I worry that the answer is ’yes’. I think giving kids a naive look at what love is sets them up for feeling rather darkly about male-female relations later when they see that reality doesn’t line up with their fairytale foundation.
“He or she falls in love. There is no stopping it. The adult version of this is that we can fall out of love. ”
Interesting. I hadn’t thought of that in terms of princess movies before. My girls watch a select few princess movies, and while it’s true they don’t show much of a “courtship,” I appreciate the fact that they don’t kiss till they’re married, and they live happily ever after, at least implying that these people didn’t fall out of love.
I suppose it helps(?) that we have had to have the divorce discussion for a long time in our family, seeing as how both mine and DH’s parent’s are divorced, and in DH’s case, remarried (and in one case, divorced again, sigh). We have long presented it as a choice that our parents made to not be married, and have stressed that is not God’s intention or plan for marriage, and just today(!) talked about how marriages are something that you have to work at, hence the importance of choosing a good partner.
I suppose those princess movies are like nearly everything else: standing alone, or given too much sway, they can be dangerous, but tempered with a little discussion, might be a good starting point. Though I bet your 3 yo just likes the talking mice…
Who knew I had so much to say about princess movies???