I Dare Say -- Movies good thing for the children! (5-16-43)

The Pittsburgh Press (May 16, 1943)

parry2

I DARE SAY —
Movies good thing for the children!

By Florence Fisher Parry

I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with my favorite story again, for it is such a pat text for today’s column.

Years ago, when movies were still in bad repute among earnest, congested parents bent on model offspring, I took my small nephew to see The Sign of the Cross. The story, as you know, was the liquidation of the early Christians. I’m sure that every adult in that little neighborhood theater was horrified over my bringing such a cherubic little fellow to see such a picture. So when the scene unfolded of the Rome arena in which the Christians were being tossed to the lions, I turned with some apprehension to my little nephew and whispered:

You know, this is just make-believe. Those lions don’t really eat Christians.

He replied indifferently:

Oh, I don’t care whether they eat them up or not.

I have never swerved from the conviction, born then, that we parents waste an unconscionable amount of anxiety over the tender sensibilities of our enfants terribles. They are delightful little wild animals with very much the same mixture of savagery and acceptance that you find in other cute little animals. And while appreciating the necessity of wise and careful conditioning, I am still of the mind that we would be wiser parents if we let nature take its course and permit our children to grow up naturally, without too much cotton batting. Later, and all too soon, life does not provide the cotton batting.

Absorption point

Now, I dare say these loose sentiments will be promptly pounced upon by conscientious objectors who will read in them a blanket approval of the most preposterous and unsuitable diet for children! Let me hasten to correct this impression. Nothing makes me so indignant as to see young mothers fattening on a surfeit of trashy movies, their youngsters in their laps or by their side, mute victims of their parents’ movie gluttony; and the appalling, wholly American, practice of sending little children to the movies to get rid of them is no less reprehensible.

But I do hold out for a more generous movie diet for our children. If I were to have to make a choice between forbidding a child access to the movies and giving him an overdose, I would, without hesitation, adopt the latter recourse!

I have found that children take in only that which they are ready to absorb. It simply does not exist. True, a child seeing a too-violent motion picture can be definitely harmed. But I think this feature is also entirely too much overstressed by anxious parents. If we are to spare our children the natural shocks that even tender flesh is heir to, then we would have to deprive our children of many Mother Goose rhymes, their most cherished fairytales, free access to the zoo and funnies, and reduce their lives to a diet of papbatter.

So, this is my advice to parents of young children: If you live safely convenient to a neighborhood motion picture theater which, upon your own personal examination, you find to be reasonably clean, ventilated and safe against fire hazards; if you can provide some older and responsible young person to go with them; if you have satisfied yourself that their vision is normal; if you have not noticed any unfavorable nervous reaction afterwards, such as bed dreams, sleeplessness and unnatural excitability; then I would say, by all means, let your youngsters go to the movies freely and often – certainly once or twice a week. It cannot hurt them.

Far from that, they will receive all unconsciously one of the most liberal, timely, topical, useful educations that could possibly be provided by any means outside the schoolroom, church and home.

The peerless newsreel

The newsreels alone have become a feature of the motion picture program which the most comprehensive of all projections of the news. For children, they illuminate geography and history, yes, even religion and the world social structure.

The animated cartoons are a veritable capsule of Mother Goose, Grimm’s Fairytales and the funnies. They are the greatest single contribution to the pleasures of children that have come out of this age. No bleaker prospect could be pictured than that of depriving normal children of the incomparable movies of Bambi and Snow White, and the innocent amusement that is derived from Pluto and Donald Duck. Even the most adult feature motion picture is bound to contain elements of juvenile education, if only because of their physical presentation of locale, customs and people.

As a supplementary exercise in spelling and reading, they have no equal. With each year, a marked improvement in diction is discerned, for at the movies, children hear English intelligently and clearly spoken and enunciated. The accents, characteristics and customs of foreigners all over the world are made familiar through this peerless pictorial medium.

There has been no map of this war so accurate and illuminating as that which has been offered by the motion picture medium. The motion pictures provide our country its greatest propaganda instrument of information, illumination and interpretation. Our children understand this war in a way that no generation of children in history have understood a war; and in direct ration to their understanding of it, will follow their understanding of the peace that is to follow. The “new world” preached by our great leaders and “universal-brotherhood-evangelist” is being presented in every motion picture theater all over the world today.

Pity the hampered, all-too-sheltered child who is denied access to this great school!

Proof of pudding

Our U.S. Army and Navy all over the world is made up almost entirely of movie-fed American boys who are now proving, in every quarter of conflict, their superior equipment in resourcefulness and initiative. They are at home in far parts. They walk the streets of London and traverse the sands of Africa and cut through the jungles of the Solomons as though they had been there before. The world offers them no surprise. No, nor the allies they meet nor the enemies they encounter. They have seen these cities and countries and peoples before.

They are the most aware Army on earth today. They are at home wherever they are sent. What shall we lay this to? The American home from which they sprang? The public schools, the churches? Oh, yes, give them their due. They have produced this new American, this fighter whose resourcefulness amazes us, their parents, who thought we knew them so well and found them, instead, magnificent, incredible strangers.

But I say that part of their equipment was forged in the motion picture theaters of America where, whether it be feature picture, cartoon or newsreel, the world in miniature was fashioned for their avid consumption.

Send your children to the movies with whatever taste and selectivity you can yourself summon. Direct them, if you can, to the choice movies. If that is impossible, take a chance. Let them take potluck. They will be better for it than not going at all. Far better.

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Norman, I enjoy Florence’s articles very much. Is it possible to see more of her work each week? Thanks, Dave

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I’ll be transcribing more of her work soon :slight_smile:

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