Back in the 1980s, a man by the name of Don Bluth was making children's films that would become iconic. Millennials, especially older millennials, could likely tell you where they were when they first saw films like The Land Before Time or An American Tail. The reason we can do that is that there are scenes from these movies that were truly horrifying to watch for children as young as four or five.
The scene in The Land Before Time, where Littlefoot's mother is gravely wounded while fighting off a T-Rex, and the subsequent talk they have while she's dying are, to this day, scenes that are incredibly affecting, even to adults. However, what Bluth did well shines through in this movie, because he didn't just put this kind of tragedy into the child's hands; he was very good at helping them deal with it in the same movie.
Littlefoot's anger and sadness are worn on his sleeve while he's talking to an older dinosaur. The older dinosaur, in turn, imparts some harsh wisdom on the child but delivers it sympathetically.
The point of the scene is for the child to understand that even through great loss such as the death of a parent, grandparent, or loved on, the memory of the person lives on within them, and it's up to them to get up and keep going, carrying the weight and shining light of that person with them in their heart and mind. What I like about the scene even more is that the elder dinosaur simply gets up and walks away after delivering the speech, leaving Littlefoot to deal with the situation he found himself in, and rely on his own strength to carry him.
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There are myriad scenes just like this in children's movies and shows I watched while growing up. The Brave Little Toaster, The Neverending Story, and All Dogs Go to Heaven were movies that introduced concepts to children that aren't easy, but they're necessary to know about and understand. My generation was given what I would come to see as gifts from directors like Bluth.
It's a gift that I noticed Gen-Z didn't receive. My son's generation, the tail-end of Gen Alpha, isn't getting it either. Having a threenager, we're currently in the process of transitioning from the bright pastels of pre-K programming to taking an interest in things that are a bit more cerebral. His main obsessions are shows that contain superheroes, as any young boy would, but I notice a marked difference in his shows vs. mine.
Where Millennial children's programming could tackle a range of topics in a way that allowed us to understand more complicated concepts, Gen Alpha programming seems to focus almost squarely on how working as a team makes everything turn out right. The message is so prolific in children's programming today that I can almost set my watch to it, with few exceptions. In fact, they all have the same bright colors that his three-and-under programs had. It's a far cry from the grimdark entertainment I was presented with.
I've been cycling through programs and, while I'm sure my experience isn't exhaustive, the only two programs my son watches that seem to carry any real emotional and conceptual weight are Bluey and the 2012 Ninja Turtles cartoon.
I think it's interesting that, according to the research, Gen Z is far more emotionally and mentally fragile than Millennials. Millennials have the excuse of having spent their formative years in a world where the internet didn't exist yet, which I'm sure helps in a very large way, but I would say that millennials were the age where social media truly started to affect their self-image. While it's pretty clear that not every Millennial made it out of that time with their sanity intact, a lot more of us did than Gen Z.
I can't help but wonder if Millennials were preconditioned to deal with darkness, physical and mental, thanks to us watching a horse drown itself in quicksand because it was too sad, or watching an A/C unit die from its own inability to control its emotions, or watching two rats duel to the death while lightly arguing philosophy. What's crazy about these scenes is that we weren't spared the visuals either. There was no cutaway. There was blood and wounds and death.
And I can't help but wonder if that was healthy for us.
If you zoom out on humanity, you'll see that, for 95 percent of our existence, tragedy and death were something we witnessed up close and personally. People died all the time, often through disease, starvation, murder, predation, freezing, drowning, and infections. Children, while spared as much as possible, often saw these things with their own eyes, not through the safety of a camera lens where the channel could be changed the moment things got too dark.
It put the world into perspective and helped highlight what was really important. Children were forged as well as fostered. Nature and nurture worked in tandem.
Obviously, we wouldn't want to put our children back into a situation where they're that vulnerable. I certainly don't, but I do sometimes wonder if, upon my son's fourth birthday, I start removing the visual safety net. I let him watch Littlefoot's mother sacrifice herself, or Shadow struggle with his mortality, as Chance refuses to let him give up on himself.
It's giving the kid the concepts in a safe environment where I can talk him through it. It's exposing him to the darker aspects of life in ways he can absorb while still having a level of insulation. I think there was something to that when I was a kid that lent to a far healthier mindset and outlook down the line. Bluth's approach now seems like madness to many parents, but I think the guy was actually onto something.
