So last weekend, my sister dropped off my 6-year-old niece for a little “Uncle-Niece bonding day.” We did the usual, Disney+, popcorn, ice cream for lunch. I decided to be The Fun Uncle and let her pick a movie. She pointed to a thumbnail on Disney+ and said “That one! The deer!”
Without looking, I hit play.
It was Bambi. No big deal, right?
WRONG.
I forgot entirely how that movie starts. Ten minutes in, her little hand is in the popcorn, all smiles, and then, boom. Gunshot. Bambi’s mom is gone. My niece just froze. Then the tears started. Then came the most heartbreaking, whispered, “Where did she go?”
I panicked. I’m not a parent. I have no emotional script for this! So I tried to improvise and told her Bambi’s mom “went to live on a magical deer farm where all deer go when they get sleepy.”
She paused. Thoughtful. Then asked, “So Grandpa’s on a people farm?”
Guess who had to explain death while texting my sister “PLEASE COME BACK” in all caps?
TL;DR: Let my niece watch Bambi, forgot the traumatic death scene, made it worse by trying to lie, and now she thinks Grandpa lives on a people farm.
Comments
You’ve been where many of us have, haven’t we? It’s funny how kids always know which movies to pick that’ll make us squirm… Did you ever get around to watching Bambi with them afterwards?
man. sorry I laughed at you. last month my niece (13) tried to convince me she was allowed to watch “American Psycho” on our movie night.
I almost fell for it (she’s not the sneaky type!) but I called her mom and ya, no. We watched a monsters high musical.
Great story ChatGPT
Is there even a single Disney movie without a similarly traumatizing death/incident? I feel like they’re all a bit of a bummer at some point or another. Still sucks that that happened of course, big oof
Good thing she did not pick “Old Yeller”. I mean what could go wrong in a Disney movie about a boy and his dog?
Oh noooo… I’m sorry for laughing but aw poor kid and poor you!
A nice, short, sweet TIFU. One day you can be the fun uncle again and laugh about it with her when she’s grown enough
Did something similar. Put on Tarzan for my cousin around the same age. She saw both of the first big cat scenes in it, and spent the next week avoiding her cat. She got over it. She’ll probably forget all about it.
Next week, Old Yeller.
Oh my god I’m laughing so freaking hard right now. This is a pretty harmless fuckup you can laugh about later on, but I can’t imagine how awkward it must have felt!
Could be worse. A relative took me to the re-release in the 1960s, a couple of years after my mother died unexpectedly. 😳
I’m realizing how bad my parents were. Original It at 7, X Files at 3, slasher movies under 10…
I had a friend several years younger than me and once he had me in tears telling story about being 8 and sneaking into TOMMY and having nihjtmares about the WW2 planes and a few other things
Hoo boy.
Kids are SO INSULATED from everything (except sex, apparently, or whatever the heck that whole toilet thing is about) and it’s honestly a disservice to them.
I think Don Bluth had the right of it when he said kids can handle anything, as long as you give them a happy ending. Maybe I was desensitized because I grew up raising and butchering livestock for consumption so I knew where babies came from and what death was so early I don’t even remember when things clicked into place, but when someone passed away, human or animal, no one lied to me and said they’d just ‘gone away’ somewhere. I was told, flat out, that they were dead. Dead and gone. Here’s what death means, and yeah it’s kind of scary and kind of sucks, but it’s part of life, now come on, work needs to get done.
Pretending like death isn’t real or giving them a skewed idea of what death is harmful for them. It just makes them more unprepared for reality. Wrapping them in bubble wrap and insulating them from every small hurt – like a death in a movie of a fictional character they’ve only known for the runtime of the film – means that the first time they get a big hurt that goes right through the bubble wrap, they’re not going to have developed a thicker skin or any way to process the hurt, it’s going to destroy their world and they will have no idea how to handle it.
Letting kids learn how to process fear and hurt and loss through fictional media is one of the best ways to help them learn how to cope with the emotional responses – and for some, physical responses – those feelings evoke in small doses. Think of it like vaccinations. That way when something BIGGER comes along – something that you can’t pretend away (or at least SHOULDN’T like her FREAKING GRANDPA) – she will have some practice at dealing with those feelings. Small doses help toughen them up so they’re better able to handle the big doses.
Life isn’t fluffy clouds and joy 24/7. Bad things happen. You can either teach them how to deal with those, or you can pretend those never happen and the first time they come up against something you can’t instantly fix, they’re going to be wrecked.
Do NOT show her
Old Yeller
Where the Red Fern Grows
Bridge to Teribithia
My Girl