The Hunger Games Parenting Nightmare or Opportunity?

                       Parenting Nightmare or Opportunity?

Thought for the day: I heard a story once about the difference between heaven & hell. In the story,  in hell there was a huge banquet table overflowing with food. The people seated at the banquet table had long spoons attached to their arms. The spoons made it impossible for the people to bend their arms, so they could not reach their mouths & feed themselves. The people at the banquet in this version of hell were all starving. In heaven, there was an identical banquet table. The people at the banquet table in heaven also had long spoons attaches to their arms, however, these people were not starving. The people in heaven had figured out that they could feed one another & they were all enjoying the bounty. Even when we are faced with difficult situations, we have choices.  The movie, The Hunger Games raises similar moral & ethical questions. What would you do if you were challenged by life & death issues? What do you want your children & teens to learn from movies like The Hunger Games?

Yesterday, I went to see the movie, The Hunger Games. It is not the kind of movie I tend to frequent. When I heard the story line about choosing teenagers in a lottery to fight to the death in a televised "reality show," I was anxious about the impact it would have on our youth. I went to see it to be prepared to help parents & teens in my clinical practice process this blockbuster movie which brought in $152.5 million^[5] (USD) on its opening weekend in North America. I am glad I went & would encourage parents to see the movie before their children, so that they will be prepared to talk about the questions the movie will raise for their children. It does not need to be a parenting nightmare any more than the book, The Lord of the Flies which is taught in most schools across the USA.

The movie is a powerful critique of many things which are happening in our society. One of the characters says, "It's only a television show." It raises questions about how television productions can distort & sensationalize reality. Each of the "Tributes," children chosen as sacrifices to fight to death for their district, is taken to the capitol to be packaged, branded & prepared to try to get "sponsors" to support them. The 2 tributes from District 12, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) &  Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are followed as they try to survive & hold true to themselves & their values. Katniss volunteers to be a tribute to save her younger sister who was picked in the lottery. She then befriends & tries to protect a younger tribute from another district. She also protects Peeta from her district. The children & adults from the districts are trapped like sacrificial lambs. The parents in  are impotent & unable to protect their children. The adults in the opulent capital are portrayed as childish caricatures of adults enjoying the horrors as if they were at a Mardi Gras celebration. The leaders, like the character portrayed by Donald Sutherland are cynical, calculating, & controlling. They give minimal hope to the districts to keep them subservient.

Unfortunately,  in our world today, in Africa, Asia & the Middle East children are being used to fight in adult wars. Terrorist recruit suicide bombers among dissatisfied teens. In 2010, the United Nations started the Zero Under 18 campaign to help stop the deployment of children to fight wars. Throughout our world, even in the United States, human trafficking of children & teens is happening. Children are being abused, kidnapped & used as prostitutes. Organizations like A Child Is Missing, featured in my book, help protect children from being abducted or kidnapped. Although there has not been a Hunger Games TV show, we need to protect our children from the abuses of children in our world. The movie will bring up the uncomfortable, yet real questions of what you are doing or can do to protect children from child abuse & war.

The kinds of discussions that this film can provide are worth having with your children.  What could parents have done to protect their children? After one of the tributes was killed one district did try to fight back. How could adults help one another & fight back? What could the children have done to fight back? The time to protest is before dictators take over. Are there things happening in the world that we as Americans who have freedom can help prevent? Are we like the people in heaven or like those hell, failing to see that there are ways we can help one another?

One Person Can Only Do So Much?

Thought for the day: On this holiday weekend what is your dream for the world? Spring is a time for rebirth. I hope that spring will help you to reignite your dreams. This weekend I have been thinking about freedom, change & the circle of life. What are your dreams? I hope you will share one dream here. As the simple edit above shows, one person's dreams can do so much to inspire others.

How often do you see the problems facing the world & feel overwhelmed? We are all busy living our lives, feeling we can only handle the demands of work & family life. When we feel this way, we think thoughts like the one above, "I'm just one person, how can I make a dent in the problems of the world?"

In 1983, I was a 3rd year doctoral student at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, I was one person stretched to what I thought was the max. I worked part time as an intern, part time as a fee-for-service psychology assistant at the Greater Lawrence Psychological Center, was a full time student & mother of three children. I was trying to complete my doctorate & had to choose a topic for my Doctoral project. I was leaning towards working on something that would build on my Master's Thesis, which looked at what helps children cope with bereavement, father absence & war. I thought it would make the project easier to accomplish within a year.

That same year, the television movie, "The Day After," aired. It was a powerful, disturbing movie which portrayed the lives of a family in Kansas the day after a nuclear attack. After I watched the film with my family,  I angrily asked, "Where are the demonstrations? Why aren't there protesters against nuclear proliferation like there were protesting the Viet Nam War?" My oldest daughter was a teenager.  With the biting honesty of a teenager confronting what she saw as hypocricy she asked, "Why aren't you doing anything?" I told her I was too busy, going to school working & running a household, but her question haunted me.

For those of you who have been reading my blog, you may already have noticed that often I sleep on or "dream on" things & awaken with new solutions to problems. After I slept on it, I woke up & realized that I could do something. I decided to use my doctoral project as a way to discover what was keeping people from taking action against the nuclear threat. I decided to create & study a technique to help promote discussion of this difficult topic & to help stimulate activism. It was harder than what I had planned to do since I was going into a new area of research, but it energized me. I felt more positive about the project & actually completed it in a timely fashion.  In addition, as a parent, I was modeling the kind of behavior I wanted my teenage daughter to emulate. Instead of telling her, "There is only so much one person can do," I was showing her that, "one person can do so much."

What is your dream for the world? What can you do today to start moving toward your dream? The 1st & most important step is owning your dream. Tell yourself what you want to accomplish & then tell others. Just conceptualizing it will help you begin to see how to fit your dream into your already busy life. In this day & age, it might be as simple as googling the issue & posting something on your facebook page every day. I'd love to hear your dreams. Have you ever felt like there was nothing you could do to change something & found a way? I'd love to hear your stories.