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Dear Care and Feeding,
My sister-in-law, “Kate,” is very protective of my 8-year-old nephew, “Adam,” to the point that she still sometimes treats him like he’s 3. To be clear, he doesn’t have any developmental/ behavioral/neurodivergent diagnoses; he might be a bit on the sensitive side, but it’s honestly hard to tell if that’s just who he is, or the result of Kate treating him the way she does.
Recently, I was watching Adam while Kate and my brother attended a work event. Something he said led me to quote a well-known movie from the ‘80s that my brother and I grew up watching (it involves a goblin king stealing a baby, and the baby’s sister on a quest to get the baby back). Adam asked me what the quote meant, and I told him about the movie, and he said he wanted to watch it. I didn’t think twice—it’s rated PG, and my brother and I were even younger than him when we first watched it. So, I put it on, and he loved it! There were a couple of scenes where he got a little tense, but I would pause it, tell him what was about to happen, and let him decide if he wanted to keep watching, and both times he did.
When his parents got him, he told them how he watched the movie and that he really liked it. My brother just said “oh, that’s great, I loved that movie too when I was a kid!” But Kate … was a different story.
She actually said to Adam, while “pretending” to joke, “Wow, guess I can’t trust your aunt alone with you anymore, showing you scary movies like that!” Adam looked a bit crestfallen, like he did something wrong, and mumbled that he wasn’t scared. My brother told him to say goodbye to me and go get ready for bed. When Adam went upstairs, Kate berated me for putting that movie on. My brother tried to tell her it wasn’t a big deal, but didn’t really defend me.
A couple of weeks later, we were all over my parents’ house for dinner, when Kate announces to the table, in front of Adam, how Adam has been waking up with nightmares “thanks to his aunt.” Then she said to Adam, “No more scary movies for you, right buddy?” Adam looked uncomfortable and said, “yeah I don’t like them, I can’t sleep.” I was livid, but didn’t react for Adam’s sake, and instead apologized to him for showing a movie that scared him. He said it was okay. My brother once again didn’t interfere. My parents know how Kate is with Adam, and just rolled their eyes and switched the conversation to something else.
Later, I pulled my brother aside and said I didn’t appreciate Kate calling me out like that. I said I also had a hard time believing Adam was actually scared by the movie, and that Kate was probably working him up over it and that she was the one causing him nightmares, if that was really happening. My brother pretty much confirmed this—he said Adam has been tired lately, and when they asked him why, he said he was having bad dreams, to which Kate said, “oh it must be because of that movie your aunt made you watch.”
As much as that annoys me, I’d be willing to let it go—except it’s now come out that Kate doesn’t want me watching Adam anymore because she “doesn’t trust me.” My brother says he can’t force her to change her mind, even though he claims he doesn’t agree with her. I’m so upset this is now going to hurt my relationship with my nephew. What do I do?
—But I’m a Good Aunt!
Dear Good Aunt,
I suppose I could reply to this letter by issuing a ruling on whether the movie in question is “okay” for an 8-year-old. Our child watched it with us at 7, loved it, and often petitions for a rewatch. But we do have friends with more sensitive same-aged kids who would never show it to them. I can’t say whether your nephew was actually scared of the movie. But I will point out that sometimes, kids might seem fine with a movie in the moment, when they’re having so much fun in the lit-up living room eating popcorn with their Good Aunt who’s babysitting, only to then develop fears of certain indelible scenes later, when lying in their little beds at night. (That’s the magic of cinema!)
I also would point out that the MPAA ratings are not a 100 percent dependable system. Here’s a fascinating article about how the PG rating has changed a lot over time—in the 1970s and early 1980s, all kinds of films got PGs that would now be PG-13, including Temple of Doom, Gremlins, and, incredibly, Jaws. We showed that last one to our child at 8, trusting in our memories and that pre-1984 “PG,” and regretted it. You haven’t lived until you console a child who just watched Quint get ripped out of Brody’s arms and chomped to bits before his eyes! Especially when you were the one who promised that child the movie was “not too scary, just suspenseful”!
The PG received by the movie in your story was awarded in 1986, so it may hold more water than the one held by Jaws. But I mention this historical fact, which I certainly did not know until we made the Great Jaws Mistake, to point out that our memories of movies watched years before aren’t always correct. Since the Jaws Debacle, we go a step further and look up movies on Common Sense Media’s Parents’ Guide. We are pretty fine-tuned by now in our theories of what we are willing to let our child see (swearing is fine, who cares!) and what things are not okay, with her or with us (no dolls that come alive, no dogs that die, no cranky old sea captains eaten up by sharks). These are family boundaries and preferences that can’t quite be summed up by the MPAA ratings.
All that said, your sister-in-law sounds annoying as hell. But a lot of parents are careful about what their kids see. That’s why, among parents hosting playdates for kids this age, it’s common courtesy to shoot a text to make sure a show or movie is approved, before pressing Play. At the very least, you’re covering your butt. No matter your own memories of your childhood, or your secret and apparently correct belief that your sister-in-law is a classic smothermother, you should have asked them first. If you think it would help you get back in your sister-in-law’s good graces to suck up your irritation and promise her that you will do that in future, you should do that.
—Rebecca
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