<p>Back in my younger days, there was a very definite line between R and G. Generally many movies were G and thats what my parents went by. In fact some movies that are rated R now were rated X then. Do they still have X?or is that porn now… Anyway, We have been more lenient parents with our D. I believe in content rather than ratings. We didnt like her watching silly G or PG stuff that was of little value and didn’t have anything decent to come away with. So yeah, content is what matters.</p>
<p>It’s hard to compare my experiences as a parent with my experiences as a child, because when I was a young teen the only ways to watch movies were in theaters or on TV. Anything on TV was essentially censored down to a very low level. And in the history of the world there were only a couple dozen movies that anyone cared to watch (outside of pornography venues) that might have garnered as much as a PG-13 today.</p>
<p>My parents started taking me to R movies with them, selectively, when I was about 12. For my 12th birthday, my mother (who was a teacher) took me and about 20 friends to see *If . . . *; she had seen it previously, and thought prep school boys ought to see it. A few years later, she started requiring students in one of her classes to see Cries and Whispers. It was rated R, and not all the students were 16 (although most were). She would arrange special showings sometimes.</p>
<p>Movies I saw with my parents included A Clockwork Orange, Easy Rider, Joe, Last Tango In Paris, M<em>A</em>SH*, The Wild Bunch, Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledgeand of course the movies mentioned above. They didn’t take me to see Midnight Cowboy, which was rated X back then, but when they returned told me they wished they had taken me – I would have liked it, and there was nothing in it they thought was inappropriate.</p>
<p>There are still a few NC-17 movies, although the rating essentially spells commercial death, since many theaters won’t show them and many newspapers won’t accept ads for them. Philip Kaufman’s Henry & June got one. I watched an NC-17 version of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution recently, but I suspect there was an R cut in theatrical distribution. (It’s a fabulous movie, by the way, and the two extended explicit sex scenes are essential to it. It would have lost something if they had been short enough to get an R, although that would have been all that was required.)</p>
<p>I’m not aware that anything I ever saw in a movie traumatized me. I am very aware that two books had a negative effect, and I wished later that I hadn’t read them when I did:</p>
<p>– The Spy That Loved Me has the only actual semi-explicit sex scene in the James Bond series, although it doesn’t involve James Bond. I read it when I was 10, and it firmly confirmed my hypothesis that sex was painful and humiliating for women. It took me a few years to outgrow that.</p>
<p>– On my mother’s recommendation, I read a novella called Coming Out by Theodore Isaac Rubin, a psychiatrist, when I was 14. The picture it painted of sex between 19-year-old college students was so blissful and life-altering that I felt – and continue to feel, actually – inadequate when nothing so mind-blowing ever happened to me. My mother wanted me to have a positive attitude about sex, but the effect was to create unrealistic expectations that took a long time to stop haunting me. There is probably no age at which I could have read this book without some degree of trauma. I can deal with the cartoonish sexual bliss of pornography and women’s pulp fiction because it is generally a string of cliches, but Rubin clearly intended to be communicating something about reality.</p>
<p>When did you see your first R rated movie?
Were you disturbed or could you handle the content?
Did you watch it alone or with an adult?
Did you have any talk prior to viewing (such as the violence is fake, this is not how to behave…etc.)?</p>
<p>Come on guys, don’t let this thread die! I love your opinions.</p>
<p>I saw The Last of the Mohicans in fourth grade in social studies class (i went to a liberal school that assessed content not rating). my teacher explained everything to us and had enough respect for us to not waste our time and tell us that it is fake or not to ape behavior.</p>
<p>opinions anyone?</p>
<p>For me, it depends on the movie and the child. I wouldn’t let my D who was 13 at the time see “Chicago” because I thought the PG-13 rating was too lenient, I thought based on the opening scene it should have been R. It also depends WHY the movie has that rating. Foul language doesn’t bother me that much; we don’t speak that way at home and my teens aren’t going to change their speech patterns based on a 2 hour movie. But violence and explicit sex are something else. Also depends on the context - the violence in “Saving Private Ryan” is different for me than the violence in “Saw.”</p>
<p>Now that D is 16 I let her watch pretty much what she wants. She’s told me they “snuck” into R rated movies over the summer, and I don’t mind (they paid for a ticket to a PG 13 and went into a different theater). She’s mature, and she doesn’t like gore-fests. Her current favorite movie is Titanic, but I didn’t let her see it until this year.</p>
<p>What drove me nuts, though, was when my S was in KINDERGARTEN and didn’t understand why the kid next door got Jurassic Park for his birthday and I wouldn’t let him watch it. There was no way I was going to have my 5year old waking in terror every night, and kids that age can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, especially when the fantasy is an unbelievably real-looking CG monster. My father-in-law actually told me I was being overprotective! He said, “He’s going to have to learn to watch scary movies some time.” I said, “NO, he doesn’t ever HAVE to watch a scary movie - and he’s FIVE! He has to learn to drive some day, but that doesn’t mean I’m letting him do it when he’s FIVE!”</p>
<p>I think it depends on the child. Our two sons were allowed to see any movie they wanted. Both probably watched R-rated movies from the ages of 12 or so on. It didn’t seem to bother either of them. If it had, we would not have been so permissive. I personally am much more bothered by violence than nudity/sex/bad language. Sometimes we went as a family but most often they went with a friend. They knew I refused to go see a violent movie myself. </p>
<p>They also seemed to be able to clearly differentiate between the fiction of a movie and real life. Both are now well-adjusted young men.</p>
<p>Just curious, would you let your child 16 years or under watch an NC 17?</p>
<p>My parents have let me watch rated R movies since as long as I could remember. Obviously they didn’t want me to watch slasher films when I was 7, but they never prevented me from watching anything. They would explain that I would have nightmares or something and that if I did it would be my own fault. They’re also open about sex with me and so that has never been an issue either.</p>
<p>Neither of my parents are strict and haven’t shielded me from anything, and their parents were the same way.</p>
<p>who hear thinks R rated movies can have a negative effect on children? adults?</p>
<p>lets see, these are all R rated movies:</p>
<p>Rainman
Pretty Woman
Godfather
Saving Private Ryan
Schlinders List
Usual Suspects
6th Sense
Deer Hunter
Stand by Me
Apocolyspe Now
Alien
United 93
Darjeeling Limited
Flags of Our Fathers</p>
<p>When my daughter was age 3, her absolute favorite movie was Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was played over and over again – I’m sure she knew all the songs by heart. * It’s just a jump to the left,
And then a step to the right … Let’s do the Time Warp again!*</p>
<p>Then when she was 5 we rented *A Chorus Line<a href=“a%20mere%20PG-13”>/i</a> and for the next 6 months danced around the house singing, Tits and ass!. </p>
<p>Anyway, the kid liked musicals. And there is something about Rocky Horror that invites repeated viewing …</p>
<p>At that age my three children liked Hap Palmer’s Baby Songs.</p>
<p>jiffypop, 6th sense is pg-13.</p>
<p>6th sense was the scariest of that whole list.</p>
<p>Of course our kids watched both PG-13 and R-rated films when they were under the age limit - they were filmmakers/critics in training! They weren’t negatively influenced by them - they were chosen by their specific interests.</p>
<p>As an adult, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, and Deer Hunter all gave me nightmares.</p>
<p>When my kids were younger, I couldn’t watch or read anything where bad things happened to children. It took me a long time to get up the nerve to watch Titanic because I heard about the scene with the Irish mom in steerage tucking her children in to drown as the ship sank. I didn’t watch or read The Deep End of the Ocean. I don’t think I’ll be able to watch The Lovely Bones, although I did finally read the book. And now that DS is 19, I can’t watch war movies. I asked DS if it is weird for him to see WWII documentaries/film clips, knowing that many of those soldiers were his exact age, and he said yes it is weird. It’s even harder for him to comprehend that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan today are his age.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t let my d. see Schindler’s list when it first came out – way too young – even though I insisted that my son see it & went with him. He was about 10. The thing with the girl in the red coat freaked us both out because she was about the same age & size of my daughter at the time. </p>
<p>It really depends on subject matter overall and the kid’s maturity as well as how that particular kid reacts to films. My daughter loves musicals and romantic comedies but never did well with scary movies – so for example, for her, it was yes to When Harry Met Sally (which probably earned the R rating because of the Meg Ryan’s faked orgasm scene) – but no to the PG-13 rated Jurassic Park, with the scary scenes of children being pursued by Velociraptors.</p>