“She can’t really be dead,” I worried.
“Who can’t,” my daughter asked. We were huddled over a computer screen, watching the trailer for the second season of “Stranger Things” just one more time. It was mid-September, and we knew we had a good month to wait until we could return to Hawkins, Indiana.
“Barbara,” I said. “You don’t just kill someone like Barbara. I mean, we all knew a Barbara.”
“Dad, she is a character on a TV show,” my daughter reminded me. My daughter didn’t look particularly worried. She actually seemed kind of amused.
” Is, or was,” I asked. You see, I really, really wanted Barbara to still be alive.
My 12-year-old giggled.
Oh, and, minor spoiler alert — if you haven’t watched the full first season of the show.
“Um, was, Dad,” she said. “We saw her body last year.”
[Read: Storytelling Is Integral to Who We Are.]
And in this way, we started talking about the second season of “Stranger Things” even before it began. We talked about the character Eleven. We wondered if the bad guys had left the lab. We considered whether an alternate dimension — aka “The Upside Down” — had changed, and my daughter even asked me who this Reagan character was that kept making me mutter under my breath every time a sign with his name on it showed up in the front yard of one of the characters.
“Did you like Reagan?” she asked after I explained to her that he had been president back when I was her age.
“I don’t think so,” I answered honestly. “But I was kind of alone on that one.”
As I reflect back on these discussions, I realize that something remarkable was happening. Can you imagine having a frank and forthright discussion with your 12-year-old about death, politics, Schwinn bicycle seats and the differences between reality and fiction? You can’t, I’m guessing, because these conversations don’t typically happen on cue. But a great story can spur discussion about all sorts of topics big and small; and while a shared television program isn’t the only way to do this, it’s certainly one of the best.
I’ve written prescriptions for families to watch TV. I don’t do this in a cavalier way. I get to know the family, I make sure it’s OK with the parents, and I try to have some sense of the parents’ values before I just blab about the stuff that I like.
[See: Listen to Your Kids, but Not Necessarily to Their Music.]
Most importantly, I try to help parents to remember exactly what my daughter helped me to recall when I initially expressed just a little bit of discomfort over the frightening content of “The X-Files” back when she and I started watching it together. I was, of course, excited to share one of my favorite programs with her; but she seemed, at the age of 10, maybe a little bit young for some of that content. “Dad, I can tell a story from what’s real,” she told me. She said this when we were watching the episode about the small town in Texas that was inhabited by relatively friendly vampires. For the record, I did curate the show for her back then. Some of the scarier episodes we put off until she was older.
The point is that through “The X-Files” we found our way to some awfully big issues. Is it OK for Moulder to break the rules in his search for the truth? How do we handle the fact that much of the time odd and uncomfortable occurrences in the “The X-Files” don’t really have explanations? These are some of the toughest topics to tackle head-on, but once again a television show came to our rescue. We could talk, in the imaginary world of “The X-Files,” about honest-to-goodness life lessons. Again, I am almost certain that if I brought these things up more literally at the dinner table, I’d be met by rolled eyes and a yawn.
My point is that watching a TV show with your kid is a good way to get across your own values, even if the values on the show don’t reflect yours. You create grist for your parenting mill. There’s even data to suggest that spending time watching TV together is good for child development. Of course, we also know that too much screen time isn’t good. Various recommendations suggest that we limit our kids to no more than an hour or two a day in front of the TV or the computer. Watching together, though? That’s, I think, a different story.
You see, that time together is golden — as even research suggests. I bet you recall watching a show with your parents. I remember when my Dad and I watched “Planet of the Apes.” That scene with the ruins of the Statue of Liberty still gets to me, and I remember seeing genuine sadness in my Dad’s eyes. My Mom, on the other hand, loved “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” She loved the example of the working woman, and I realize now that she wanted me to see that possibility early in my development. These were my parents’ values, and they got them across to me through a shared television experience.
If all you do is watch TV with your kids, then you’ve missed my point. But if you tuned into Netflix to watch “Stranger Things” with your children, then odds are you had some pretty important discussions. That’s more or less the metaphor of The Upside Down. There’s no chance for discussions in that frightening place. (Watch the show. You’ll know what I mean.)
[Read: Secure Attachment: Parenting From the Inside Out.]
As for Barbara? I’m holding out hope for the show’s third season. My daughter thinks I’m silly, but she smiles when she tells me this. That’s golden, that smile. That’s what we’ll remember.
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The Benefits of Watching TV With Your Kids originally appeared on usnews.com
