Children's Media: Books vs. Movies

On July 4, I wrote about parents' attempts to limit their children's reading as "loving censorship," but in my first post, I mentioned the importance of finding age-appropriate books for young readers. I want to clarify this seeming contradiction. Sometimes parental direction is both beneficial and necessary, particularly when a popular children's book is adapted to a film that "everyone" is going to see. Not only will the movie be marketed to a much broader age group than the original book was intended for, but there's an essential difference between text and images.

As communications theorist Neil Postman explains in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, written language is a complex system that requires skillful interpretation; thus it functions as a kind of self-authorizing code. If the child is old enough to understand complex sentences, sophisticated vocabulary, and abstract thought, she is probably mature enough to handle the content of the text. Thus it's relatively easy to protect children from "adult" information encoded in books.

Film, on the other hand, presents information in images, which do not require (much) decoding and are fairly easy to understand. Therefore, movies and television have no built-in safeguards to protect children from receiving information they're not intellectually or emotionally ready to receive. I will never forget my shock at seeing six- and seven-year-olds racing up and down the theater aisles at a showing of Jurassic Park. Parents who thought dinosaurs + Spielberg + McDonald's tie-in = children's movie were outraged by the violent images in the film, but they would never have handed Michael Crichton's book to their children (nor would the kids have gotten through more than a paragraph or two).

Adults as well as children enjoy Harry Potter precisely because the series contains so many intellectual challenges: e.g., sophisticated vocabulary (including British slang), complex characterization, subtle foreshadowing, and detailed plotting, not to mention the daunting length (the fifth book, Order of the Phoenix, is 870 pages long). Understanding the movies does not require the same skill and intellectual maturity, however, and there's nothing but a parent's "no" to protect young viewers from frightening images. I would recommend telling kids that they can see the movie only if they read the book first. Readers who are too young for Harry Potter's dark tone and occasionally violent episodes are likely to give up on the book as "too hard" long before they become upset, unless an adult is reading and interpreting the book for them. And this leads me to my final point.

Allowing children the freedom to make their own reading choices means letting them decide when to put a book down. Young readers are capable of figuring out on their own that a book is too hard or scary or "weird" (i.e., out of sync with their beliefs and worldview) for them, and they will put it down without having to be rescued.