Aloha Friday: Minimum Age For Superheroes
Being a geek, I love superheroes. I grew up watching He-Man, Superfriends, Spider-Man, Batman: The Animated Series, Superman and more. Super powered individuals who protected the innocent from the forces of evil resonated deeply with me and I spent plenty of time pretending I was super-powered as well. It should come as no surprise that, when I became a parent, I wanted to introduce my children to the world of superheroes as well.
I can’t remember exactly NHL’s first encounter with superheroes, but it might have been a Spiderman kids’ book. After that, I expanded to Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Ben 10 (both the original series, Alien Force and now Ultimate Alien). NHL and JSL love running around pretending to turn into aliens. I even went online with them to the Superhero Generator to let them make their own heroes.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure if the world of superheroes is having a bad effect on them. Their playtime together seems to revolve around them “turning into” superheroes and fighting each other. NHL will also “turn into” a superhero to ignore us/run away from us instead of listening to us.
Part of it is their normal development, I’m sure. After all, siblings fighting isn’t abnormal. Neither are kids who want to do their own thing without their parents telling them not to for whatever reason (dangerous, no time, homework to do, etc). Still, I find myself wondering how much their normal development has to do with it and how much has to do with the folks in spandex and capes.
Thus, my Aloha Friday question for today is: At what age did you introduce your children to superheroes?
Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.
Aloha #59
I love this post! I have 3 grown boys who are all loved superheros and all the ‘rough boy playing’ that was inspired by the comic books and shows.. I am sure! 🙂
Let children be children.. as long as there’s no blood! lol Great post, blog and attitudes about life! Love it!
Found you through Aloha Friday & following! Have a wonderful weekend!! ~ Coreen
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my 1st child is only 4-years-old and he has been introduces to a lot of them. but his first is not of superheroes but of ‘starwars’. hubby bought him a light saber at a tender age of ‘1 and half year old’.
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I think it was Super Grover and I am not sure when it happened. They did turn out okay.
Have a great Friday!
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I don’t think I ever did. They just found out about them. Probably from friends.
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My son is 4 and has been exposed to super heros a bit, but not extensively. He sort of grasps the idea of a super hero but probably couldn’t name most of the classics, you know?
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Yeah, when to introduce things to kids is a struggle. I can’t remember when we introduced superheros…actually, my son learned about Spiderman from a friend, but we introduced Star Wars (sort of kinda like superheros) at age four and 5 and by default (cause the little one watched them play) 2–not the movies, but the lego version video game. Then a year later we introduced clone wars and let them watch parts of the orginal series. They started dressing their stuffed animals in capes after watching Word Girl on PBS, of all things.
The two year old plays lightsabers with the other…and for the longest time did it gently (just swoshing it in the air and makign sound affects, or tapping their brother’s lightsabers gently) but now he hits things with it (not people…we broke him of that early, but the things is harder to break him of). That’s more from watching his brothers play than the games I think.
With our oldest, he started imitating my husbands fighting video game at 3, so we had to not let him watch that. Then at 4 (and 3 for the younger) I made the mistake of introducing them to an old cartoon I loved as a kid–Cities of Gold–which I found online. Its not incredibly violent but has scary parts (which the younger had nightmares over–doh!) and swordplay (which lead to me discoving my two kids bouncing on the bed with “swords” — ie large kitchen knives. Yeah, that scared me to death and lead me to purchace them some plastic swords cause I didn’t want them to be tempted to play with something worse.
If I were to do it again, I would have waited before introducing that (the lego game, no though…they were ready then). But it’s hard when your older children are ready but your youngest just gets exposed to what they’re watching and doing. You just can’t insulate them from that.
Aren’t boys born with knowledge of Super Heros?!?
I think it was instilled in my boys at birth however my daughter never really cared. hehe
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I’m not sure at what age, but the boys love Super Heroes.
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