[kstenerud]

TBH I don't even see the problem with a three year old seeing A New Hope (except that he might be too young to understand it and might get bored and turn it off). What damage are you hoping to prevent, exactly?

Exposure to new ideas is a GOOD thing. Actively preventing your children from knowing about something simply because you disagree with it is censorship in its worst form.

[Avenger42]

Parental censorship is widely accepted, and not even worth comparing to state-sanctioned censorship, which I would argue is "censorship in its worst form".

Every parent has a right and a responsibility to teach their children in a way that they see fit, and though the state can be called in for cases where their teachings are far outside the norm, to take away or limit these rights is to remove the parent from their role.

Of course you can disagree with how someone else raises their kids - aunts, uncles, and grandparents have been doing that since the dawn of time.

But, just off the top of my head:

- Very young children: Owen and Beru's bodies after the stormtroopers find them?

- Slightly older children: Torture of prisoners on the Death Star?

- Near-teens: A greedy scoundrel as a "hero" through much of the film?

I see plenty of reason to prevent children from seeing them until you feel they're "ready". I don't have children yet, so I don't know when that would be for mine.

[joshbuddy]

It really irks me that in these conversations, we don't talk about the rights of the children, instead, it's just seen as a sliding scale between the rights of the parents and the rights of the state.

Of course, all of this makes me think of Ogden Nash's poem "Don't Cry Darling, It's Blood Alright" ... two lines:

Innocent infants have no use for fables about rabbits or donkeys or tortoises or porpoises, What they want is something with plenty of well-mutilated corpoises.

(It's also crazy that I can't find a complete copy of a poem from 1935 online)

[timwiseman]

It depends on what you mean by right, its a very context dependent word. In one sense, rights are precisely the things which the government is not permitted to interfere with. So in that sense it really is about the ability of the state to interfere (or not) with the way a parent raises their child.

In the broader sense, it becomes somewhat hard to talk about because it might matter greatly much how old the child is. My 3 year old is simply not in an position to make many good decisions for herself, but my 6 year old gets a fair bit more freedom, and as they get older I will hand more of the reigns of their own lives to them happily.

It is also hard to talk about separately because in a sense a child's rights are what is left over after the state and the parent divide up their rights, any right absolutely given to the child is denied to one of those two entities. Should I have the ability to restrict what my 3 year old sees? I think most would agree that I should.

Should I have the ability to restrict what my 13 year old sees (when one of them reaches 13)? That is touchier, but I think most will answer, "Yes, but you should use it less and listen to their judgment more." I certainly think that even when my child turns 13 I will want to keep them away from materials that overtly objectify women and I will judge on a case by case basis if they are ready for horror films or not.

For what it's worth, I agree with your sentiment at the end that many parents overly coddle even older children. But I also respect that each parent has the privelege and duty of making those decisions for themselves and their children until those children cease to be children.

[timwiseman]

I did watch A New Hope with my three year old, but the point is I decided that it was appropriate for my daughter and watched it with her so that I could explain anything she asked about and cut it off if it turned out more violent then I remembered.

I would not force the children of other parents to watch it, and I would be outraged if some government body said I couldn't show it to my three year old.

[hef19898]

I watched all three original Star Wars movies with my son (Episode IV through VI) when he was three and a half and honestly, I don't get the point why you shouldn't as long as you watch it with your kid. Since then he likes Jedis as much as he does knights in general. Aparently it didn't harm him.

As far as parental censorship goes every parent may decide for himself. but when parents are starting to try to get convictions of teachers for reading books in school they should rather for home teaching if that is legal. Books are knowledge and as long as they are read in the proper context they can only do good. I mean it#s not that Shakespeare or the other classics (e.g. Goethe's "Faust" or other works of him) are any less violent and / or pornographic. Personaly, I have problems with banning books or art, we have been at this place already too often I think.