I took Quinn to see Transformers, The Rise of the Fallen last night.  Yes, he’s only 7 years old, and yes the movie is rated PG13, and yes we thought for a long while about taking him.  Nikki and I have up to this point more or less completely shielded both of the boys to the exact same level, meaning that if something is too much for Cael, then Quinn wasn’t allowed to see it. This made things much easier for us parents as you can imagine, but I have started to feel that Quinn was a little cheated out of what he deserved since there is a growing gap in maturity between the boys.

Granted, perhaps taking him to a movie like is isn’t the best way to address that gap in maturity, but to his credit, he took it all in stride.  We talked about the movie beforehand, how it was going to be, and I took pains to remind him that it wasn’t real, etc.  In all, I think it went pretty well.  We laughed together at the funny parts, we both jumped at the surprising parts, and we both thought it was awesome.  It was a tad mature in language, which I think he heard without understanding what it really was (time will tell on that one), some slightly sexy content, and certainly lots violent.  It was a bad movie to see if you have an aversion to robots kicking the absolute crap out of each other.  I would have to say that the violence to humans was toned down more than the last one.  There was still lots of humans getting blown up (think A-Team style-explosions, but with way more CGI and money) of course, but it didn’t seem as obvious as before, if you are willing to ignore the implied human killing.  Like when an entire aircraft carrier is blown apart and sinks in 45 seconds, there’s a pretty strong chance that some folks got killed there, but we didn’t see it, so that’s ok.

I may be crazy of course, and watch it again and wonder what I was thinking.  Perhaps part of the success was that Quinn insisted we sit in the third row of the theatre, which was perfect since he talked quite a bit and we didn’t disturb anyone, but we also missed a lot of the stupendous action because we were sitting so close to the screen.

As for the big question: have I wrecked my kid by letting him watch a movie like that?

I was in geek dad heaven, but I think as an experiment it went ok so far.  I will have to update you on how it went once Cael hears about it, he’s still at Nanny’s house.  I think either way, it will be a while before we let Quinn watch something out of his age bracket, just to wait and see how it goes.

Anybody think I’m nuts?