Children handle scare movies differently at different ages. Up to 5 or 6, they usually have trouble distinguishing between fact and fancy. Later they develop a detached “now wait a minute” voice that allows them to face up to the witch in “The Wizard of Oz” and say, “Oh, this is a movie.” Younger children don’t have that voice, says Dr. Scott May, cochairman of the committee on children’s television and media of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. As a result, they can incur something like the delayed reaction of posttraumatic stress disorder. “I’ve had numbers of children in therapy still haunted by something that they saw two years ago,” he says.
Regardless of age, reactions may depend on how secure a child feels. “I don’t think by themselves most of these movies can cause a terrible trauma,” says Dr. Stanley Leiken, professor of child psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. Some children are also more sensitive than others, Leiken notes. “There are kids for whom scary movies are devastating, and others for whom it’s like falling off a log.”
Some parents think the shrinks are too cautious. If most grown-ups enjoy a good scare, the argument goes, why deny it to kids? So what if they have a nightmare or two-does it warp their lives? A part of growing up is learning to deal with stress, notes Manhattan-based child psychiatrist Gerald Dabbs. From that standpoint, getting scared out of your Nikes is not the worst thing. “It may be very painful right now, but kids will be able to come to terms with it,” says Dabbs.
_B_Dark side:_b_In “The Uses of Enchantment,” his classic study of fairy tales, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim went so far as to suggest that parents who censor the grimmer Grimms and gorier stories can squelch their children’s imagination. “The dominant culture wishes to pretend, particularly where children are concerned, that the dark side of man does not exist.” But Bettelheim failed to distinguish between oral tales and today’s visual media, says psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, who focuses on the psychological impact of films and TV. Images are seldom left to the child’s imagination these days, she says. “Instead, they’re left to the special-effects wizards-which makes them far more assaultive to the senses.” So, best heed the ratings, Lieberman and other experts advise, meaning, in the case of “Jurassic Park,” a PG-13, or parental guidance for children under 13.
All of which makes one nostalgic for preratings creature features like “King Kong.” As Kong-era kids knew without parental guidance, the big lug never meant any harm to anyone-not even child psychologists. He was simply in love, But they don’t make monsters like that anymore.
