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











More information about the HPFGU-OTChatter archive