by Carol H. Morgan

Created on: August 23, 2008   Last Updated: October 23, 2008

A friend of mine had a difficult parening experience recently. His child got called into the principal's office for calling a friend something that he had heard - IN A DISNEY MOVIE! This illustrated to me something that I had already guessed once or twice. Unfortunately, just because something is labled "G," animated, sells sugar cereal or gets marketed for children does NOT mean a that that program is automatically for children.

In fact, I have experienced a growing level of dissapointment as I have realized how much inappropriate material is in these animated or other "children's" programing lately. And just so that I am not misunderstood, I don't think there is MORE of such content in these types of programs than other types of shows that are for kids, just TOO MUCH, and often an unnecessary amount for its target audience.

In fact the inappropriate content in movies for the pre-teen set is often precisely the level of inappropriate that kids of this age are going to understand and pick up on, and so it is the kind that they often target with the toilet humor in these movies. So while Sinefed might have innuendo about sexual or other adult subjects, my kids won't UNDERSTAND most of the referenes to that type of humor at this age. A double entenfre about birth control or something like that would probably go right over their heads, even though it might change the movie's rating to a PG. So the kind of things that they put in Disney or other animated movies for ages 5-12 is often the mildly crude body humor that they are so sensitive to they pick it up through the air.

They respond to this type of humor with that familiar uproarious laugh that only a boy seeing a cartoon character pants fall down. It will roar through the theater - HAAA HAA HAA strait to that "I need a tylenol" place in my head. Of COURSE it is easy to get a cheap laugh from a seven-year-old by saying the word 'poop' or having a character kicked in the crotch, but such content is not what makes these programs widely-cherished, to parents or even their children, as much as they seem to appreciate it at the time. Often if the empty cheap toilet humor or innuendo was removed, the product would be just as good, and in most cases, certainly better. But what will be left is a ten-year-old who is less sensitive to crude language in his presence and a parent just a little bit too tired to raise her guard back to the level that the Disney movie managed to breech.

The most upsetting thing to me as a parent

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