HELP! Any fellow parents of young Potter fans out
xcpublishing
xcpublishing at yahoo.com
Tue Feb 15 20:00:34 UTC 2005
Andromeda:
>HI everyone, I have a bit of a dilemma. My six-year-old daughter
>has gone and become a Harry Potter fanatic, which naturally thrilled
>me at first. I've really enjoyed reading the books out loud to
>her. My problem is that we've just reached the last part of GOF and
>Cedric is going to die (tomorrow night, yikes!) and OOTP lurks in
>the near future. Has anyone else out there read Books 4 or 5 to
>their young children?
Hi Andromeda! I'm just about to start reading GoF to my seven-year
old daughter. We watch the movies on nearly a daily basis, and she's
starting to ask me what happens in the next book. I think just going
over the graphic scenes in detail will help - asking her how she
feels about it, how she thinks Harry feels about it, why she thinks
Voldemort killed Cedric... frankly there are worse things than
Voldemort in our own world that I have a more difficult time talking
about. I haven't really shielded mine from anything - when she was
four, her favorite movie was The Mummy with Brendan Frasier and both
my kids have seen it dozens of times. My five year old now loves a
movie called Jeepers Creepers which is a pretty scary horror film (I
actually wasn't going to let them watch it after the first pretty
terrifying scene, but they begged and begged) - they've never had
nightmares and I think it's because I watch the movies with them and
overanalyze them to death. We laugh during Jeepers Creepers when the
boy keeps walking closer to the scarecrow creature and my son
says, "I would have gone back to the house when I saw it move the
first time; that boy is not very smart" and I reply, "They had to
have him go over there or it wouldn't be a scary movie." In one
scene, someone is beheaded and I showed them how the neckline is
perfectly smooth and the skin is quite plasticlike - it's very
obviously a mannequin. They are both getting pretty good at finding
things that are fake and they ask a lot of questions about how the
movie people do makeup and effects. It's kind of disappointing to
have to say, "Well, it's all done with computers. Spiderman isn't
swinging through the air at all." So far, neither of my kids have
shown any violent or extreme behavior and they both draw happy stick
people and houses and flowers, so I don't think they've been damaged
my "freedom of information" approach.
Nicky Joe
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