to not be particularly pleased when ds comes home from nursery having read a book about all the monsters in Dr Who?

[FrannyandZooey]

Another child brought it in, and he and ds spent the morning looking at it.

I would rather things like this from home were "oohed" over briefly by staff before being put away on a high shelf "to keep it safe until home time".

Ds particularly interested in "The Garlics"

"Mummy why do the Garlics try to kill Dr. Who?"

in what programme do people drink other people's blood through a straw? .. fascinating

My ds has playdates with other children as old as 8 and 9 and they are pretty good at finding common ground. This mass-media crap isn't the only thing children are capable of being fired up about it, and you are doing them a disservice (not to mention swallowing a dirty great cynical lie from the merchandising-media giants) if you feel that it is. IMO

It's the first episode of the new series of Dr Who, Twig

IME your child will go on a playdate and be introduced to a whole new world of things that you, as a mother, have managed to keep him away from. Especially true if playdate child has older siblings.

you see I don't really watch Dr Who .. and neither do my kids .. although we did watch bits of the first series and I am happy for him to have the Dr Who Magazine because it encourages him in his reading and they always have great 'toys' attached

I personally feel its a balancing act between your judgements and your child's judgements which becomes a finer and finer line as they get older .. so whilst one might think Power Rangers are crap (and oh I do, as do most parents) the imaginative play DS gets out of Power Rangers' toys and activity books far outweigh the benefits of him not having them .. and yes he also has benign non-merchandised toys which he plays with .. sometimes the back story bonds the children

on a happy note, my 8 yr old ds1 appears to have grown out of Power Rangers - hooray.

but franny's ds is NOT interested in dr who

one of his friends is

am confused.

don't really see why they are reading comix in nursery ANYWAY.

I think the point is that his interest in monsters has been picqued by access to the Dr Who book and he is now showing more interest in things he hasn't done before (like the monsters in the shop)

Reading ANYTHING is good IMO. And Dr Who has been around for aons. I watched it as a kid and I'm reasonably normal. Haven't drunk anyone's blood through a straw recently or anything.

I watched it as a kid too. But I think the modern version is (unsurprisingly) more graphic and more violent.

I honestly reading a comic is a different experience to watching it on the telly anyway. I was terrified of cybermen as a kid, but I think I must have enjoyed my terror.

i do think the modern version is a LOT better. some fkn emotional lieracy and an acknowlgement on the series deep, underlying, campness and the fact that the doctor is shagging his "companions". Thank christ. better than some creepy old man transporting nubile 17 yos around the galaxy in some kind of fatherly role, which is eeew. God its WATCHABLE now.

I do not like the garlics, they are too deus ex machina for me.

it was always violent.

Looking at my youngest son, I made a conscious decision to step away from choosing his toys. He is a person who is really into toys and make believe (in contrast to my older son who loved a good chat at attention from adults). This trait came out in my younger son when he was a toddler. Toys really matter to him and he had really strong ideas about what toys he wanted. I decided it was much better to let him lead the way, as long as he played safely and nicely.

His choice of soldier toy might not have been PC, but the things he did/does with them covers all sorts of areas - playing alone, setting soldiers up and arranging them, playing soldiers in groups with other children, making bunkers and camps indoors and outdoors out of anything he could find, painting pictures of soldiers, writing military signs and lists, using a toy medical sets to be an army medic, model making out of scraps and rubbish to make complicated guns and tanks, swapping soldiers with friends, etc ect. Last weekend we went to a party where the host's 8 yer old boy has aspergers and apparently has not many friends at school. My son had never met him before and I didn't know how things would go. DS brought along a bag of toy soldiers because the other boy also liked army games. As soon as they met, they bonded and they played soldiers happily together for most of the four hours I was there - no tantrums, no upsets. If it takes some non PC toys to help this to happen, all power them!

I think I understand what Twiglett's saying and if so I agree.

I tried to write something but it sounded garbled so I've given up.

But re the 'no advantage in being interested in Dr Who'. It could be said there's no advantage in being interested in dinosaurs at that age. Pretty grisly stuff. But of course we could reel off lots of 'educational' advantages. Sometimes I don't think imagination is given enough credit.

and tigermoth has made me try again.

I feel parents sometimes have strong views that they want their children to have. And even though they are very young, they might want to make different choices for themselves and they might actually be good choices for that child(just like tigermoth's toys and soldiers, etc)

har

tigermoth's son's soldiers

"How come Dr Who is to be discouraged but a equally sci-fi/new age/witchcraft stuff like even Harry P, aforementioned Pratchett or Jasper Fforde is okay? Don't get it man. "

My son is 4. Just 4. I don't read him Harry Potter or Pratchett or any of those things. Has anyone on here said that they do?

I think people are making big assumptions about what they think I am saying and not actually reading what happened.

My dd would have come home doing an impression of the belching wheelie bin from the first series if she'd spotted a Dr Who book in school.

She's more scared of some of the older monsters (my brother is an avid fan and has most of the back episodes of previous incarnations which my dd has watched with him) than the current crop of 'Garlics'.

Just tell him that the Garlics can't fly .

am still utterly pmsl at "The Garlics"

and garlics can fly

ever since oooh-can't remember but was VERY scary

deffo this season they can. they do it quite a lot

dp has a good cartoon about physical vs theoretical discrimination with a picture of a garlic at the bottom of some stairs saying "well thats buggered up our plans for world domination then"

My ds loves the Absorbalov, played so sublimely by Peter Kaye. I don't agree that the modern series is more violent. I've said it before on this thread, but I think it's camp, and consequently, very, very funny.

I have no prob's with my toddler watching it. Good always triumphs over evil, and the baddies are well defined.

I would rather he watched Dr Who than a soap.

Fillyjonk, I know the cartoon you are talking about, and it still makes me giggle, years after I first came across it!

Dr Who used to have a moral line about the doctor never using guns - other goodies and baddies did (he was hanging around with the army in John Pertwee's day, aftter all. They never figured out that Daleks are impervious to guns). That all changed when Colin Baker (boo, hiss) came along. Can't recall if 'new' Doctor Ecclestone or Tennant has used guns? But I think the Doctor prefers to talk baddies out of being bad when he can - ref. the Christmas day episode introducing Tennant. And the New York Daleks episode showed clearly the dividing line between one man whose experience of WW1 led him to become an aggressor and another man whose experience of the same war led him to become a leader of men who tried to negotiate his way out of a crisis. And the crisis was resolved by the Doctor a. appealing to the most clever Dalek and b. doing something scientific.

FWIW Cybermen still scare the crap out of me. Have to hold dh's hand when they come on!

i DO take issue with the science

it plays into this whole "science as mystery for clever people" crap.

But dr who is not especially bad here, most sci fi (asimov etc aside) is guilty of that.

"I would rather he watched Dr Who than a soap."

It isn't compulsory for them to do one or the other, you know.

But frank

WHAT will do when your ds starts school?

eh?

eh?