My advice to future parents

When I was a child, I remember having watched a lot of Disney Movies, and having been to Walt Disney World with my parents. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Mulan, yes, I think I know them all as well as the princesses I (we all) wanted to be alike. I had not thought about them for a while when the article Why Does Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Have So Many Female Fans, written by Marcotte (2013), brought back the subject. The author made a link with Disney movies, arguing that they depict “the old ‘my love tamed the dangerous beast’ fairy tale of romance” (Marcotte, 2013). It piqued my curiosity, so I started to explore the theme.

A lot of articles critiques Disney for its representation of gender role, domestic violence, and so on. To be honest, I first did not expect that: my kid’s perceptions were still prevalent. But then I thought that, because those movies are mediated popular culture, they play a huge role in perpetuating society norms and values (Sellnow, 2014). I had to recognize that even my classics – The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, and Mulan – were not an exception. Since when you are a child, you do not have fully functional critical faculties, I totally understand people who take interest in those movies, or in the “princess phase” (Paul, 2011), that is – according to me, both natural, as Paul (2011) wrote in his article Is Pink Necessary?, and highly constructed. If male newborns wear blue, and girls wear pink, it is because of social construction of gender. Not surprisingly, little girls want to wear pink, or to dress like princesses for Halloween (please count the number of little girls who are dress up as princesses each October, 31^st), because “it is what girls do”.

Disney does not escape the rule. Until Frozen, the movies made by the company were all (or almost) about the same story: a women who is saved by her Prince Charming. Both end up marrying each other, having many children, and “living happily ever after” (Yoshida, 2014; Rosten, 2013). Yeah! Actually, no. There is no reason to be proud of this happy end. All it says is that a women is a real one when she is married, does housework, and takes care of the children. Oops, let’s not forget the most important: she must be gorgeous (those who are not beautiful are always depicted as antimodels). Always. Moreover, she is powerless, her husband is always stronger.

Of course I do not believe children are sponges who retains every single message in order to apply it (if so, being parent would be easier). But I fundamentally think that there is a need for the parents of young kids to educate them, so they will be able to recognize what is good, bad, what is reality, and what is fiction. Disney movies actually does not convey only bad values, right?