It's probably a given that my son is going to like superheroes. I like superheroes, my husband likes superheroes, so why wouldn't the kiddo like them? And what's not to like about superheroes?
Well, there's the whole violence thing. My kid is two and a half, so he's still living inside a protective bubble when it comes to television, books, the Internet, and pop culture in general. We have this idea that we want him to spend these early years thinking of the world as a gentle, happy place, so his TV viewing is limited to small doses of Sesame Street and The Backyardigans, and his books tell the mildest-conflict stories imaginable. (The truck is stuck in a pothole? Oh, no! Call the tow truck!) We're holding off indefinitely on introducing even most Disney movies, because I don't think he's ready to see Nemo's mother and siblings savaged by a barracuda or deal with the extreme creepiness of the cobbled-together toys in Sid's room. So the necessarily violent realm of superheroes seems like a very distant prospect for us.
And yet, all the boys I know who are older than about three – and many of the girls – are fascinated with superheroes. They wear Spider-Man pajamas and Batman masks, they fly around the house like Iron Man or stomp around like The Hulk. Their parents, like my husband and me, may never have let them watch any movies or TV shows about these characters, but still, they latch on immediately to the ideas, the costumes, the good-guys/bad-guys dichotomy, and the cool zip-pow action.
So this is undoubtedly coming for my kid. But he's a smart, curious little guy, and he already asks a lot of questions to understand the context of things, and how am I supposed to explain good guys like Superman without getting into the evil-doing, world-destroying bad guys? How do I let him know that these stories depend on bad people trying to hurt other people – and indeed, that this happens in real life, too? What's the right way to talk about this?
I know his everything-is-wonderful bubble is going to get popped at some point; I'm just not sure what the next protective layer – cotton batting? fleecy blanket? – is going to look like. My fellow GeekMoms... any advice?
