Ratatouille, Glitter Glue and the Booming Thing
A few Saturdays ago, I bought the G-rated Disney/Pixar film Ratatouille. I was in the checkout line at Target, next to the display of popular DVDs when I spied it. "Ratatouille" said the cover, a tiny Eiffel Tower gleaming in the background. "Buy me!" screamed the merchandise. My thoughts turned to Paris and I snatched up the DVD, tossing my impulse buy into my shopping cart while cursing my lack of will power. So here's the deal: I don't get out much and the thought of indulging in a little armchair travel with my children was heavily appealing.
Yes, it's pathetic that my trip to Paris would be by way of a cartoon rat with a bad accent but I was desperate. Besides this was no ordinary sewer rat, this was Remy, a rat of considerable culinary talent and he was French, oooh la la! I had not researched this film on-line, but I had checked with friends and they'd all said it had gone over well with their preschool age children. When I got home, I slid the Ratatouille DVD into the player and waited for my 3-year-old twin boys to wake up from their naps.
Later that day, my husband and I settled into our too small couch, each of us holding a boy. Showtime! Our little boys watched in silence, taking it all in. Then, about 12 minutes into the film, a granny with a shotgun begins to shoots willy nilly at the fleeing Remy and about a gazillion of his rodent friends, pelting her ceiling full of holes. This act terrified my boys, who fled the room and raced down the hall crying. "Turn it off, Mama, " they sobbed, refusing to go near the television. So that's how far we got through our first viewing of Ratatouille, roughly 12 minutes. My husband and I rushed off to comfort our distressed children, reassuring them that the rats didn't get hurt. We didn't discuss the scene in detail and my boys did not mention the film again. We retreated back to the world of PBS Kids.
The other day, however, one of my boys asked me if he could have the empty gift wrap roll he'd spotted in my closet. Sure, I said, wondering what he planned to do with it. "I'll need tape, " he said, adding, "and some glitter glue." Then he sat down at the table and busied himself with his little project. I was thrilled to see a boy of mine finally request to do an art project! (Sure they do lots of things, including coloring, but art projects with glitter glue? Never!) He taped up one side of the roll, filled it with with a couple of Kapla blocks and then sealed the other side up with tape. Then, he put stickers and made drawings scribbles all along the outside of the roll, adding dollops of glitter glue for the finishing touch. It looked like a cute little rain stick. My boy initiated and completed an art project - whoo hoo! He was proud, I was proud. (I can just see my creative friend Carla rolling her eyes as she reads this; her girls do art projects all the time!)
I suggested to my son that he bring his rain stick with us to grandma's house.
"Grandma, I made a BOOMING thing!" said my boy, beaming. Grandma looked it over, impressed. "What is a booming thing?" she asked. "I'm booming at the rats!" he demonstrated, shaking his stick up and down, eyes cast toward the ceiling. "Boom, boom!" he shouted, taking aim at invisible rats. My heart sank.
The "booming thing" hadn't been rain stick.
The "booming thing" had been a shotgun, just like the one he'd seen in Ratatouille.
Yep, for my son's first self-initiated art project, he'd made a gun. I was at once proud (hooray, art project!) and horrified (yikes, a gun!).
Ah, karma. (Or irresponsible parenting, as some will say.)
Gosh, wouldn't it have been nice if my son had developed an interest in, say, cooking á la Remy, rather than in the gun used in an attempt to shoot Remy down? Sure, I'm all for pretend play but I'd rather not have them acting out scenes of violence. I'm also not ready to explain the whole gun thing to my precocious 3-year-olds. That could get ugly. And sure, my brother grew up pretending to play "army man" with his friends, shooting at each other in the backyard and all that, and he grew up to be one of the most kindest people on this planet. (And he's never owned a gun.) By the way, I don't really want to make this post into a debate on gun control. (That has happened before here and I'm sure opinions on the issue have not changed.)
Rather, I use this incident as a reminder of just how impressionable children are at this young age. I really ought to have known. As is typical at age 3, my kids are so impressionable, modeling their pretend play after much of what they see in real life, which is why they're also into drumming like my cousin and guitars like our amazing Spanish teacher Susy Dorn. So it's really no surprise that my boys might also imitate something they see in a movie. And my boys love to do boy stuff like collect sticks and jump from high places. On a similar note, a friend of mine was aghast to catch her husband walking across the monkey bars at the park (yes, folks, that's about 10-12 feet above the sandbox), their young sons watching in awe, ready for the chance to try out their own walking-atop-monkey bars skills. So my point here isn't so much about gun control specifically, but more about being vigilant over what I choose to expose to my children, based on my own set of values.
As for us, Ratatouille will have to wait. I'm just hoping the next time I let my kids view it and they ask for glitter glue, they choose something else for their art project. The Eiffel Tower, say?
Original post to Silicon Valley Moms Blog.
