Yes, And #20: Classic Movie Dad-Lights To Watch With Your Kids This Summer
as well as the weekly recommendations...
This week’s edition features: a mini-essay about what movies to watch with your children this summer, my favorite recent reads, and the weekly recommendations.
📎Yes, And: Some Good Reads
+ Dupes Are Changing How We Value Our Things…
+ The Importance of Religion in American Lives Is Shrinking…
+ 25 Years Later, Seinfeld Feels Revelatory…
(And speaking of Seinfeld…)
+ Is Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes Canonically Hot?
✍🏻 Yes and…Classic Movie Dad-Lights To Watch With Your Kids This Summer
Recently, Ashley and I were talking about our son and considering something he mentioned about wanting to run for exercise this summer. He mentioned running the greenway close to our house, but Ashley and I were both hesitant about this idea given that it’s a greenway and he’s a kid. We just had some concerns about his afety.
AND THEN…
…we remembered that in 18 months, he’ll be driving. Like, on roads. IN A CAR MOTOR VEHICULAR SITUATION.
This reminded me of a feeling I had last summer. As the season drew to a close and we were revving up for school and shopping for school supplies and dress codes, something dawned on me:
Somehow, my teenage son still hadn’t seen Jaws, a perfect movie and DEFINITELY the perfect summer movie.
It was in this moment that I realized my paternal failure. I had dropped the cinematic ball and probably diminished his childhood irrevocably.
It’s just, once kids get out of the toddler phase, it all starts moving so fast. You get so focused on the particulars of all the different seasonalities and then you look up and they’re wanting to run the greenway by themselves and drive slowly by car lots.
Instead of getting your arms around anything, parenting often feels more like frantically chasing to keep up and in the process, barely keeping perspective on what your child is capable of and what you should have spent time preparing them for.
This, inexplicably, is both about Jaws but also so much more, and despite the “so much more” probably being more important and urgent, this summer, I’m committing to catching him up on the great and classic movies.
I paused for a long time between starting this paragraph and finishing the previous one because I began to interrogate the “WHY?” behind the preceding sentence. What’s the motivation behind prioritizing movies over other more functional skill development that we’ve yet to emphasize?
I put value in being familiar and aware with various cultural relevancies. To me, the more fluent you are in all kinds of subjects and ideas, the more likely you are to be curious, accepting, and empathetic. I’m probably biased and narrow-sighted on this, but growing up, movies / art helped unlock a lot of what I felt about myself and the world and I want to replicate that experience for our kids.
I’m a little let down by a lot of the modern types of media capturing headlines today and their viability in teasing out those aforementioned thoughts of the transcendent, divine, and profound.
Most of all, if I’m being truly transparent, it’s because movies are a language I love and speak well and that my kids are still amenable to.
So much of parenting is trying to communicate ideas and lessons and values, but also knowing that the more direct and straightforward you are about communicating these things, the more reticent your kids are to hear them. Often, there needs to be a buffer in the form of another person or a shared text that they can see or interpret without the complication of this person or thing ALSO being their parent.
But additionally, in my experience at least, not only do you have to parent each of your children differently, but you also have to parent each child differently as they evolve and change. And part of this requires excavating new ways to connect with them. It’s the adapt or die idea WRIT LARGE because the second you fail to adapt and adjust to your child’s new sensibilities or priorities, you risk losing a waypoint to them.
All this to say, if you resonate with any of this or feel similar, I’ve put together an excel spreadsheet I’m linking to below that we’re going to be using this summer and beyond.
Feel free to plagiarize shamelessly, but even more than that, I’d love to hear what you’d recommend adding and I’ll update the list accordingly for our Yes, And Community.