Kids & Parenting
May the Force Be With Them
Why does Star Wars still take over the minds of small boys?
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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away—circa 2006, at our old house in D.C.—my husband and I let our little boys watch Star Wars. Eli was almost 6 and had just broken his leg. We were housebound, antsy, and despairing. In a moment of weakness, we turned on Star Wars. We figured, like most indulgences, that the movie would thrill and then pass.
Wrong. Our younger son, Simon, who was not quite 3, couldn't sleep that night or for many nights over the months that followed. He was obsessed. He talked about the movie to any relative, friend, or baby sitter who would listen and plenty of shopkeepers who wouldn't. He relived the trash-compactor scene. He worried over Obi-Wan Kenobi's Jedi sternness and Darth Vader's glittering malevolence. He sniffed out plot twists in the rest of the endless six-movie saga (who knows how) and tried desperately to work out why Darth Vader could be Anakin Skywalker and Luke's father—and could also cut off Luke's hand. Here's a little girl sweetly summarizing the Star Wars plot. Simon wasn't sweet. He was feverish. He was short-circuiting. Thanks to our two hours of stupid indulgence, Paul and I concluded, his neurons were melting.
In the annals of the mommy confessional, the ante is ever being upped for what counts as a real lapse in parenting. Perhaps an almost-3-year-old's single viewing of a 1977 fantasy film barely qualifies. But it's become our family's classic tale of second-child sin—committed, regretted, and, we hope, recovered from. In the first of three episodes (unlike George Lucas, I know to stop with one trilogy), our younger son falls from grace, exposed to something he shouldn't have seen, because of his older sibling. In the second, the brain poison takes hold. And in the third, the child grows up enough to conquer the experience, or at least make sense of it.
During Episode 1, in the throes of Simon's initial fixation, I happened to be interviewing child psychologist Edward Zigler. In the middle of a conversation on an entirely unrelated topic, I veered off into my family's Star Wars woes. I was confessing to Dr. Zigler, but in that rueful way that's really a bid for absolution. Instead, on the other end of the line, I heard only silence. And then he said quietly that indeed I had erred and that Simon probably shouldn't watch any more movies with violence or even suspense, for, well, years. Here's a 2007 study from Seattle Children's Hospital that links violent screen images to aggressive behavior in boys (not girls) ages 2 through 5.
My husband, Paul, had already settled on Zigler's medicine. We banished Luke and Obi-Wan for Dora and Bob the Builder. But we couldn't wring the Star Wars characters out of our children's lives. Long after the actual memory of the film faded, Eli and Simon talked and played in George Lucas' world. When we refused to buy them toy light sabers, their baby sitter rolled up newspapers into sturdy cones. The kids crayoned them green, purple, and yellow and bashed each other over the head, not quite Jedi-like. With their friends, they dissected the business of Jabba the Hutt and the furriness of Ewoks, never mind that they appear in later movies that my kids have never seen. Driving a carpool a couple of months ago, I listened while someone else's 6-year-old held forth about the intricacies of the plot in the prequel films in more detail than he could have described his home. My kids fell silent out of awe. Then our current baby sitter took pity on them and gave them a Star Wars Fandex. Eli read the whole thing, card by card, and Simon somehow absorbed by osmosis facts such as Emperor Palpatine's other name (Darth Sidious).
Emily Bazelon is a founding editor of Double X, and a writer and editor at Slate.
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