Three Life Lessons We Learned from Avatar

Hearing hype about a movie makes me want to see it less. I have never seen Titanic, and intend to keep it that way. I was prepared to never see Avatar either. Except that my husband said he’d like to see it in 3-D IMAX. So, for his birthday treat, I took the whole family to see it last night.

I worried about my decision to bring the kids. The movie’s rated PG-13 with good reason. I mistakenly thought my husband had researched the movie and decided it would be okay for the girls to see, so I never researched it myself. If I had, I’m not sure I would have taken them. There is a lot of swearing and some scary scenes of violence (scary for kids under 13, like my youngest, Roo).

Avatar helped me teach teach Roo three important lessons though. Although there are exceptions to all three of these lessons—except for the third one—at her age, these lessons will be true for most of the movies she sees with us for some time.

1. The hero never dies. We, as the movie-goer, insert ourselves into the movie as one of the characters, usually the protagonist. This is what makes horror, adventure, and suspense so thrilling to us. Unfortunately, it is also what makes these same things unbearable for very young children and children who have been traumatized. For her, knowing that the hero would not come to fatal harm made the scary scenes endurable.
2. It always gets worse before it gets better. This is what makes any challenge rewarding. If there’s nothing at stake, if the work isn’t “hard enough,” then the reward tends to be empty. The same holds true in life, and especially adoption. The unspoken corollary to this, which I hope my daughter picked up on, is that it always gets better.
3. Mom is always right. The movie is completely predictable. Every time I saw Roo begin to get scared, I leaned over and whispered in her ear what was going to happen next. Normally, I wouldn’t do this. It takes all of the fun out of a movie. So does being terrorized though. Every time I told her what was going to happen next, it happened without fail. So thank you, James Cameron, for helping me show my daughter that her mom really does know what she’s talking about. Seriously though, this builds trust. Because if Mom was right about Avatar, then maybe just maybe, she could be right about other things too.

Despite the language and violence, I’m glad that I brought both girls to the movie. They thoroughly enjoyed it, and I’m sure would happily add their voices to the hype. Admittedly, it was a fun movie with many visually stunning scenes. As predictable as it was, I enjoyed it a great deal.

Roo also came away with something wonderful that I hadn’t expected—but should have. As with many foster children, she has frequent nightmares. We’ve worked with her on ways to handle those scary dreams, but these tools have all been given to her by grown-ups. She came up with a new tool to add to her arsenal—her own weapon in combating her frightening dreams. She has decided to imagine herself “going blue” just like in the movie whenever she goes to sleep. We’ve expanded this to help her with other frightening things, like going to the basement alone. Now we tell her, “Go blue!” This afternoon, on her way to the basement, after my husband reminded her to go blue she gave a ferocious little growl on her way down. Go blue!

Tags: anxiety, life, movies