Many great movies for kids with a G rating are still not right for sensitive young viewers from around six to eight. While various issues affect kids differently, generally media that portrays death, abandonment, and pain or suffering can trigger feelings of fear and discomfort in younger children. Therefore, you may want to wait on […]

After we felt it was time to introduce D to more media and to movies, we decided to establish a twice monthly family movie night. Things went great with Mary Poppins and Kiki’s Delivery Service, and movie night seemed like a sweet time for family bonding … until A Bug’s Life. Someone had recommended the […]

The animated film Kiki’s Delivery Service stars Kiki, a thirteen-year-old witch. In this story, the custom is for witches of this age to go off and train independently for a year. Thus begins Kiki’s coming-of-age tale in which she heads off on her mother’s broom and ends up settling in a small, beautiful city by […]

D votes for Mary Poppins as the best movie to show sensitive kids. This was one of the first full-length movies she ever saw and one of my all-time favorites—the start of my lifelong love of Dick Van Dyke (who plays Bert) and Julie Andrews (who plays Mary Poppins).

My partner and I are lucky because we both work from home. This allowed one or the other of us to provide our daughter, D, with pretty constant entertainment when she was a baby and toddler and to delay her introduction to screens. This is a luxury, I know. We thankfully didn’t even have to […]