Well, do you?, originally uploaded by FezzusAustralis.

America has become so politically correct.  Everything and anything has to be screened tons of times to ensure that it won’t offend anyone.  One of the worst things that is happening now is how people are trying to put children in a bubble.  I was looking at my feeds when I saw this article, “How to Choose a Movie for a Child.” It goes on to say that some Disney movies are inappropriate for children, and then the writer starts talking about how anime is way too adult for children.  This really annoyed me because it’s trying to shelter children to a point that anything is “too much for them to handle.” I want to tell them about all those kids who I met in my life whose parents tried to protect them way too much.  What usually happened?  When they went to college and were away from their parents, they started partying, sleeping around, and drinking like crazy.

You can’t shelter your kids, people!

I came from Panama where we grew up watching anime and not caring about the movie rating.  My parents would tell me to close my eyes during sex scenes, and that was the only censorship we had.  Since I was young, my family would give me sips of their drinks.  While all the kids here were talking about how cool they were for going out and getting drunk, I barely drank.  While all of them were sneaking in rated “R” movies and sometimes copying the stupidities they saw, I had more of a “Meh” attitude.

This is the way I am raising my children.  I am not censoring everything that they come across.  If it’s something that is disturbing to them, like the recent death of a 21-year old kid riding his motorcycle in my parents’ neighborhood, we sit down and talk about it until they are satisfied.  We live in the world that is full of crazy things, and our job is to ensure that our kids have the right tools to handle them.  We won’t be able to do this if we shield them from the realities of the world.