Fighting and Stealing

The other day my parents brought to my attention that CMan was watching a movie that was not appropriate due to its violent content (XMen) with all the fighting that was going on. I shrugged it off because although there is probably a grain of truth to what they were saying, I'm not one of those people that overly concerns herself with that. As long as he's not watching Friday 13th (yet) or watching super violent movies every day, it's OK with me. For the most part, he watches Spongebob, Disney movies or Dora and sometimes he watches iCarly, Drake and Josh, Spiderman, Pirates or Wizard of Oz.

You know what though? Even cartoons can teach kids bad things. The other day when Cman got mad at me he said "I hate you". I told him that it was not nice to say that to people. I figured that he picked it up at daycare. He could have, but the other day, Spongebob was playing in the background and I heard Squidword say "I hate you!" to Spongebob and CMan said "look mom, he said I hate you!" and I said "I know, that's not very nice is it?" and he said "no". Granted, Spongebob may not be geared towards preschoolers, but even the Dora cartoons have bad influences.

Any parent familiar with that cartoon knows that there's a character named Swiper. It's a fox that goes around stealing or swiping things every episode. The lesson comes in when Dora and her clan say "Swiper No Swiping!" and that usually puts and end to it. My son on the other hand, doesn't pick up on that nuance. On Easter morning, we went to Manders house and CMan and Brandon were playing with one of Brandon's toys. When it was almost time to go home, there was no sign of the toy that Brandon had lent to Christian. We looked everywhere and couldn't find it. We asked CMan and all he said was "I lost it". Brandon was convinced that CMan was trying to steal his toy and had hidden it. I, not thinking that Chris was capable of that, assured him that it would be found eventually under a couch or something. Just as we were about to leave, R looked inside of CMan's Easter basket and sure enough, there was the toy. When we got in the car, we asked Chris why he had taken the toy and put it in his basket. R told him it wasn't nice to swipe things. His reply? "I was swiping it like Swiper!". Nice.

Just comes to show you, even the most innocent show can teach them something bad. Perhaps a little sword fighting isn't too terrible after all huh?