6 Horrible Lessons Hollywood Loves to Teach Kids
Let's face it: TV and movies raised us.
So when we talk about the lessons Hollywood teaches kids, don't tell us it's all harmless fantasy. For a generation with one parent in jail and the other passed out drunk at work, the lessons from movies were all we had. And as you'll see, most of them were bullshit.
#6.
Your Single Parent is Really Just Waiting for You to Set Him or Her Up!
As Seen In:
Sleepless in Seattle, The Parent Trap, Kindergarden Cop, The Mighty Ducks
There are about 25 million kids in single-parent households in the US alone, and a whole lot of them would like one of those cool dual-parent deals their friends have. Hollywood knows this.
That's why they love to show kids scenarios where they help their parents find romance (just ask the young Lindsay Lohan in the Parent Trap remake!). Hey, look, the new handsome kindergarten teacher just happens to be the ideal match for your spinster mother, and he's a former body builder to boot! The world is magical!
This one has a corollary, which is, "Your step-parents are always jerks who just want to spoil your fun.
In the Real World:
So the movies convince these kids they know everything they need to know to be terrific matchmakers. Now, how exactly how can we expect people who still think girls have cooties to understand the rules of dating? They don't even understand the fundamentals, like the importance of boobies.
So important.
What kids need to learn is that even though the lunch lady may seem cool because she gave you two churros, your dad is more likely to be concerned about her harelip than her mashed potatoes.
And no, it's not a good idea to try to reunite your parents by setting them up on an elaborately conceived "coincidental" meeting while you keep your evil stepmom occupied with childish pranks. If movies worked like the real world, we'd have had nothing but two hours of Lindsay Lohan crying off the pain of being flogged like a redheaded stepchild. Literally.
#5.
The Creepy Recluse is Actually the Nicest Person on the Block
As Seen In:
The Sandlot, Big Fish, To Kill a Mockingbird, Star Wars, Home Alone, Toy Story
The scary old lady in the old house, who's rumored to be a witch? She's really just a lonely, misunderstood old woman who just needs someone to talk to. The filthy, scary guy? The one rumored to be a serial killer? Just an eccentric. Why, getting to know either one of these folks could give you brand new insights that will help you mature and grow!
This one also has a corollary, which is, "The mythical junkyard monster is actually a big friendly dog."
In the Real World:
It's obvious that this theme is an attempt to teach kids not to judge a book by its cover. And that's great, but the problem is that sometimes the cover contains valuable information.
Looks (and is) crazy.
In the real world, kids should not talk to the scary man with the moustache, the eyebrows that connect and the windowless van. He did not offer you that candy bar because he is a former baseball star looking to regale you with tales of pitching against Babe Ruth.
And for that matter, in the real world, "Beware of Dog" signs aren't warning you that you'll be covered with Saint Bernard slobber while trying to recover your baseball. It means the dog's owner is tired of getting every time his dog bites off a toddler's arm.
In movies, investigating the scary places always works out for kids. And sure, we should reward bravery, open-mindedness and curiosity. But Hollywood might mention that visiting the creep who walks around in a clown suit sometimes just wins you the chance to appear on a milk carton.
#4.
Dares Are Serious Business!
As Seen In:
A Christmas Story, How To Eat Fried Worms, Back to the Future
In movie land, a kid who doesn't live up to a dare is ostracized from the kid community forever. A dare is like a contract. One he never signed, and had never agreed to prior to being told he had to live up to it. But God help the kid who backs down!
In the Real World:
The best possible outcome of taking a dare is winning the adulation of a bunch of people not known for their long memories. If they do somehow remember it, you won't go down as the tough kid who had the courage to meet the ultimate dare. You'll just be remembered as that weirdo who, under mild peer pressure, once ate a dog turd.
(It's just a melted Snickers bar.)
Kids don't exactly have good judgment anyway (another reason they're not allowed to run for office) but having Hollywood depict the guy who eats a handful of earthworms as some kind of schoolwide hero is not going to help the situation.
Of course dares are just lazy devices for screenwriters to get a kid in a ridiculous situation. Sure, they'd like to teach kids to stand up to a crowd of dumbasses, but then how are they supposed to get the main character's head stuck in a toilet? They can either give him a near-psychotic aversion to being called chicken or rewrite the character to be functionally retarded. So, yeah, basically one option.
"That way you can rationalize the bad treatment without having to admit that you're 1) just physically weaker and 2) an insufferable nerd. That might mean giving up things that you enjoy, like wearing T-Shirts that express your opinion on the Greedo Shot First controversy."
ReplyNo, it is NOT a reason to give up these things. If anything that is more reason to KEEP them. Giving up these things is surrendering to bullying, and bullying should NOT be surrendered to.
The easiest way to combat the issue with number one is to just help your kid understand that there are some people in the world where it's worth more of your sanity to just completely ignore their existence, and that it's OK to defend yourself if the previous point proves physically impossible, most likely by way of a confrontation.
ReplyI met LOADS of dicks in my life with BOTH lifestyles, and eventually came to the conclusion to just ignore the living hell out of them. Turns out the lesson on internet trolls CAN overlap on real life.
In 8th grade I stabbed a bully with a pair of scissors after he hit me with a 2x4, never had a bullying problem after that. Sometimes you just need to say; "FUCK IT" and take matters into your own hands.
ReplySometimes even that won't work, if the bully can convince the teachers that you started it, or that you were the bully.
Fighting back sometimes helps, but it shouldn't be relied upon. We need either to have a better sense of justice in schools, or to give up on them and use distance education.
#2 should have an article for the worst examples out there.
ReplyHere's a Horrible Lesson you overlooked that's fairly related to #4: Schoolyard Fights Are Epic/Decisive Battles.
ReplyYou know the routine: A kid is being bullied, and the bully eventually challenges him to a fight after school. Word of the impending fight spreads like wildfire, and before you know it, it's the talk of the entire fourth grade class. The fight happens with the entire class gathered to watch, and the winner receives the adoration/respect of the entire class, while the loser is shamed for the rest of his (movie) life.
In The Real World:
Schoolyard fights are usually clumsy brawls that happen instantaneously (usually when a kid has finally reached his limit with somebody else's incessant teasing/bullying) and are witnessed only by whoever happens to be in the area when they happen. They generally end not with the bully (or the victim) submitting or getting the daylights punched out of him, but with a parent/teacher intervening or the two fighters becoming too exhausted to continue.
If they DO end with somebody getting knocked unconscious, the result usually isn't the victor being crowded with enthusiasm by the other kids for his "victory." But with the other kid being sent to the hospital and the "victor" being sent to the principal's office and/or the police. And, if the fight ends in a stalemate (as most schoolyard fights do), it'll probably just be lunchroom gossip the next day and then immediately forgotten by everybody, except maybe the person you faught (who, to be fair, might finally leave you alone afterwards - I've noticed that a lot of bullies will leave you alone after you fight them, even if you technically "lose" the fight, since they probably still took a few nasty punches/kicks).
No kidding about dares. Eating something gross is one thing, but dares get way too serious sometimes. A 13-year-old girl tried to cross 8 lanes of freeway traffic, reportedly on a dare, last month. She made it across one before being hit and killed. I had to pass the scene on the way home from work.
Replysomebody dumb enough to do that deserves to die.
no, someone as big of a p***k like you deserves to die you faggot.
Most of your list has valid points, but there were a few that were off base. Others have already mentioned that Draco Malfoy was not abused - just a dick. Bran, in Goonies, was not "pushed off a cliff", he was propelled off a steep road embankment, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he was riding a bike - it was because Troy the Bully (also not abused) hates him for the interest his girlfriend shows in Bran and how Bran obviously wants to date her. Dudes in cars and on motorcyles don't pick on people on bikes because they hate bikes and the people who ride them, it's because a dude on a bike is seriously outmatched by a motorized vehicle and vulnerable.
ReplyAs for dares being serious business, Back to the Future makes it a point to show how that notion is stupid and self-destructive. Everytime Marty gives in to his injured pride at being called a chicken, he gets screwed over - until the third movie where, spoilers, he finally learns his lesson and realizes it doesn't matter what assholes think of him.
Thank you, I was bullied mercilessly at school and most of the kids doing it weren't the poor kids with the scum bag parents, they were the spoiled rotten kids who's parents let them do whatever they wanted their entire lives and never punished them no matter what they did.
ReplyNaw I wouldn't say Malfoy was abused, he just was snotty because he was raised in a wealthy pureblood house hold. So he was prejudiced against poor people, muggle horns and anyone that wasn't in the Slitherin house.
ReplyEven then, though, he turned out to be one of the milder villains, as Half Blood Prince demonstrates especially well. His warped worldview was instilled in him by his father Lucius, hence more of the blame belonging to Lucius than to Draco himself.
Draco Malfoy never shows any indication of being abused at home until (SPOILER) Voldemort helps himself to being the Malfoy's houseguest. His parents (Lucius, at the least) did have high expectations of him, or at least expected him not to be outshone by someone they barely considered a person, but both Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy clearly loved their son very much and treated him well. He acts like a horse's ass to the main characters because he got off to a terrible start with Harry, his dad hates Ron's dad, he barely considers Hermione a person, let alone a legitimate witch, and more broadly, due to the general rivalry between Slytherin and Gryffindor. The blood purism's not super awesome, but it was never really mentioned in the books whether it was true or not as a matter of anything other than opinion, so it gets at least a bit of a slide. There are indeed some very magically potent Muggleborns, and some very incompetent purebloods, but the strongest wizards in the series are pureblood or halfblood, and it does make some sense that two powerful magic users would have the most magically-capable offspring on average, though not always.
Reply@#1: I think the problem with the way bullying's portrayed in kid's movies is that it's grossly oversimplified. Not only are there varying reasons for bullying, but there are also different kinds of bullying.
ReplyFrom my experience, Serial Bullies (ie. people that bully just about anybody, regardless of who they are) are indeed insecure, and that's why they bully people to begin with. For example, the resident Serial Bully at my middle school suffered from severe dwarfism. So his reasoning for being a bully was pretty clear to everybody. Similarly, even though he may not seem it (since America seems to have picked up this incorrect idea that wealth = self-confidence), the spoiled rich kid who bullies everybody else is probably just as insecure (for example, he may feel everybody's more evolved/developed than he is, since they actually worked for their success rather than having it handed to them - so he's venting out his frustration at them).
But then, you have the bullies who target you (or maybe you and a few other people) specifically but are pretty decent to everybody else. At which, yes, it is probably because there's something about you that rubs them the wrong way. Maybe you inadvertently did something to upset them (probably something really petty, but still...). Or maybe they find the way you dress, behave, etc. too ridiculous for them to really understand. So they bully you for it, because they don't really know how else to respond. Or, hell, maybe they're just playfully giving you a hard time (as guys do with one another), and you're taking it a little too seriously.
It's a very wide issue, which is probably why so few movie directors (and, for that matter, teachers, etc.) really seem to understand it.
the person who wrote this artical must have been a weakling when they were a child because when i was a kid i could ride a bike all day and not be tired and i wasnt skinny and all the kids i knew could aswell. and we could our bikes pretty quickly
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesSome of us happen to have found:
1.The Internet, the amazing stream of things that interrupts exercise.
2.Band Practice, which will f**k up your calves by literally pouring lactic acid into your legs
3.A lack of access to flat land (I grew up on a hill. 40* downhill/uphill slope. You'd get tired too.)
4.Correct grammar, which makes any argument seem more convincing
5.Asthma; Try riding a bike all day when your throat closes up
So, let's all be happy that we grew up how/where we did, and can brag on the internet about our amazing feats. Whoo. You win. Now please, take a look from someone else's life.
cgun, randell clearly is speaking for the kids on the movies the author stated was not possible and unrealistic. its clearly realistic, i myself lived in an area with hills and have covered miles and traveled from town to town with no trouble simply out of necessity. I'm from a small town and the only way for a kid to get around is on 2 wheels. no cab's, parents have there own stuff to take care of(there jobs, house work, cutting and splitting fire wood for heat, gardening to feed me) and out of respect i rather not ask them for rides when i could take care of it myself. i walked up hills and went at my own pace which grew faster the more my body adapted to it, i never shifted gears(i didn't and still dont know how to use the shifter properly) and it didnt ware me out.
Most of the biking time was during the summer where there was no band practice as well as most fo the time the kids in these movies are not exactly Jr High or High School band age.
I grew up in a hugely hilly area, there were no flat extents to bike, I had asthma, and a bike with only one gear. My friends and I managed to bike all over the area and still had plenty of energy to get into trouble.
I don't think it was all that uncommmon, half the kids in my town did it.
I was still in elementary school when How to Eat Fried Worms came out, and I swear two thirds of my class spent their recess eating worms.
ReplyDraco Malfoy IS a spoiled rich kid. Yes, his dad is a world-class asshole, but not towards him.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesUsually, pre-2011 Cracked bits on Harry Potter feel like the writer saw the movies once while drunk, but in this case, it looks like they read a lot of pre-HBP fan fiction. Huh.
Draco is still psychologically abused and threatened almost constantly by Voldemort and other Death Eaters, you idiot. He is an ass only because his traumatic private life forces him to be.
So much for a HP expert.
@ MrTastyBubbles Draco isn't threatened by Voldemort and the Death Eaters until the Half Blood Prince, and Voldemort isn't even resurrected until Goblet of Fire. In the other five books it's made obvious that he's a jerk because his parents spoil him rotten.
And how about Dudley? Classic case of Just Plain Spoiled. He had to get within breath-smelling distance of having his soul sucked out before he realized that the world doesn't revolve around him. And afterwards, he had no knowledge of how to express a basic, "thanks for saving my life, dude!" because his folks never taught him anything about gratitude, even to themselves.
No, Harry Potter doesn't belong in that list, because if it did, HARRY would be the biggest bully in the world. He was the one that was raised on abuse and neglect.
When I was a kid, if I'd ever gotten magical power (even apparent) over the bullies of my life, I'd have abused it so badly someone would have locked me away.
And can I just say that the beach (Cannon Beach) that abandoned restaurant is on in the Goonies is a good 30 minute DRIVE from Astoria. In a car. Them Goonies have got some heroically strong legs!!
ReplyYay, Oregon! Hi-five!
I keep trying to tell people that, no, the bully is not insecure/ comes from a bad home. Sometimes people are just assholes, plain and simple.
Reply"A dare is like a contract. One he never signed, and had never agreed to prior to being told he had to live up to it."
ReplySo, it's like any regular contract you have to deal with as an adult? Any business that has you sign a contract includes a stipulation that they can change it in any way, shape or form they please. The contract that you signed need not resemble the one that you HAVE to live up to.
#2 typically isn't an intended lesson as such. It's usually just pure schadenfreude.
ReplyI never saw Wile E. Coyote as a bad guy. He was just too pitiful. Stupid Road Runner. I remember being anxious as a child watching their show because I was always rooting for Wile and I'd hope during each episode that Wile would finally catch him. Stupid, condescending Road Runner.
ReplyWhen I first started watching Western cartoons...I'd also assumed that the Roadrunner was the bad guy (he had natural superior physical ability and was able to pull off stunts that would result in the equivalent of a Wile E. Coyote deaths with barely any effort...whereas the coyote was clearly the underdog, not the brightest mentally, and often having to rely on gadgets to even attempt to keep pace with the Roadrunner). And he was also perpetually let down by the company that manufactured all his gadgets. Add to that his appearance--wide-eyed confusion and nose and all that--he seemed much more the 'good' guy.
they're right about the "misunderstood bully" thing, I've known bullies who had rather level headed parents who couldn't seem to control their kid (usually not enough beatings).
Reply