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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

I'm super careful about exposing Disney content to my kids. The especially pre-2000 era Disney content is absolutely damaging and well documented in the academic community for that. Disney content gets created to increasing shareholder value, not for the long term well-being of your child. This means anything that can get kids addicted on easy entertainment sudar and spend more money on toys, books, trips is a good thing. In addition, I've become very averse to starting subscriptions given how hard they are to get rid off and stay underutilized. I already have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Xfinity and now I also have to do individual networks and studios? This is one reason I don't think newspaper, magazine and more subscriptions are going to fly as long term business model. People will sonner or later realize that everything cost same as cup of coffee but we are just being forced to buy way too many cups.

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> The especially pre-2000 era Disney content is absolutely damaging and well documented in the academic community for that.

I'd be interested in follow-up reading on the academic research you're gesturing towards here- do you have links or any specific names/citations that would point to the material you have in mind?

There was a good discussion (I can't get link) where an expert basically said that STEM enrollment for girls fell through the roof in last few decades is highly correlated with series of Disney movies that virtually every young girl was exposed to multiple times building their characters as "template" which deeply affected psycology of these children.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/24/...

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/disney-movies...

https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.12...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-011-9930-7

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.933...

https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/etd_theses/4094/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-017-0773-8

http://www.hillpublisher.com/UpFile/201803/2018032844432581....

https://firescholars.seu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=105...

https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/handle/11375/14406

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_The_Walt_Disney_C...

How is post-2000 Disney better? Their movies are literally ads for their toys that you pay money to watch. Their toys are ads for their games. And their games are basically crack cocaine for kids.

Most of us outside of entertainment business don't know this but Disney had been taking huge dissing from media as well as academics for princess movies. They have started change their ways and recent slew of movies like Moana focuses far less on being pretty and waiting for price to arrive putting female character as a confident leader. But you have to be very careful in chosing Disney content. As I said, ultimately entertainment company's goal is to hook you up with crack cocain, not your long term well being.

It's not like Mulan was focused on being pretty and waiting for a prince either. Or Brave(not pre-2000, just not recent), or even Pocahontas.

I feel if anything the "pretty is everything" comes from toys, rather then the movie plots themselves.

Little mermaid is amazingly bad

Most of these are basic mad libs.

Young, beautiful girl runs into conflict because ____. Foolishly and/or impulsively, she attempts to solve the problem herself by ___, but of course she is too weak to do so. Luckily, she is saved by the charming man, who resolves the problem by ____.

Wrap it around details of a fairy tale and bam: $300M+ profit.

Yes, and Disney took the criticism about Ariel in stride and made Beauty and the Beast, about a studious bookworm resistant to the charms of boys. Still firmly in the 90’s.

Might have been nice if her defining trait as per the title of the movie wasn’t her beauty then.

Step in the right direction, still pretty lame.

The princess in Beauty and the Beast exists to redeem, civilize, and forgive someone who has kidnapped her family.

This is not a narrative I find more compelling for my daughter than a mermaid trading her voice away to have the opportunity to seduce a sailor prince.

If you view most golden age and resurgence Disney it's glaringly clear. By and large the women are shoehorned into submissive, weak characters at the mercy of a white knight.

The thing is, this really wasn't just a Disney thing, it was largely a Hollywood thing in general. Strong(er), three-dimensional women in film narrative didn't hit major motion pictures with significance until the late 60s and into the early 80s.

The late 1980s was an unfortunate time for Disneys resurgence, because somehow there was also a revival of strong man/weak, beautiful woman tropes in Hollywood. So when movies like The Little Mermaid, The Princess and the Frog, Tarzan, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast came out they very much followed this template.

The plots of these and previous movies hammer home that the young women are meant as prizes for men who come and save them. It's in the stories themselves.

A lot of it has evolved into including a single strong woman who demonstrates her skills, often in fighting, early on but doesn’t actually add much to the plot.

I’ve been pretty pleased with the last several years of children’s content though. A lot of it feels respectable of kids intellect and aware of where we’re trying to get culturally. Inside Out and Zootopia come to mind.

Frozen is an interesting one in that I felt it was mostly in line with previous Disney film tropes but it had a lot of plot points that allowed them to say, technically, it wasn’t.

I completely agree on golden/silver age disney being quite bad (with some exceptions, like Alice or Bianca)

I am unconvinced about the disney renaissance characters: jasmine literally storms out of a room saying "you can't decide what's best for me" to her father, aladdin and jafar; the little mermaid saves the prince, before she saves him; Belle doesn't get saved by anyone either, and the strong handsome man is actually the bad guy.

I mean, sure, they exemplify a certain passée idea of woman/girl, but they are a far cry from cinderella and sleeping beauty.

Jasmine acquiesces and is set to marry Jafar, the little mermaid needs saving in the end.

Also note how many of these present older women as the villain.

Personally, I'm a big fan of Sophia the First. She's a princess, but she's learning her way to becoming a capable ruler. Quality entertainment, just below Aquanauts.

Thanks, I appreciate your followup. I'm genuinely interested in discussion on this topic. I was hoping there was something more focused summarizing the academic consensus in a given field of study that you were alluding to, but it appears not.

One thing I noticed is that the focus of these is on gender-stereotypical portrayals of princesses. Is only the princess-themed content specifically seen as 'damaging', or is Disney content not featuring princesses also suspect?

Another detail is that a good number of the results you dug up seem to be reflections on interactions with the 'Disney Princess' line of toys and media which was launched in 2000, which would suggest that the most 'damaging' of this content is specifically 'post-2000'. Was there something about pre-2000 Disney content you had in mind that's especially damaging, that is not the case with the post-2000 Disney Princess line, or is it all garbage?

I don't have link to original talk I'd seen but if you search Ted talks for disney effect, you will find many discussing this. Saying that it just does "gender-stereotypical" portrayal grossly underestimates the impact of these movies. The message I took home was that young girls with constant exposure to Disney princess movies significantly decreases their future probability for enrollment in STEM.

However it's just not about girls, it also impacts boys negatively as well. If you have to read one great book about raising kids, make it NurtureShock. One thing I learned from it was how kids learn to value nature vs nurture. When you tell your kid "great job! you are smart" you are basically saying they have natural capability to do great things, they don't have to work for it. So when they fail, they tend to interpret that there is nothing they could do. Parents who say "great job! You worked hard for it" have much more successful kids. One simple phrasing makes huge change in their lives. NurtureShock has detailed analysis and citations.

Back to movies... Here's the thing: Do you love Star Wars? Lord of the Ring? Harry Potter? Do you know what is one common thing between all of them? The hero in the movie is born with capabilities to be great. You are Jedi because force with you since you were born. You are just that way. You didn't had to work for it. You are just destined to be the great, it's written in the stars. Story writers know this simple thing is cocaine for people and they keep creating more supply to keep us fed. We get hooked on to it right away but its not good for us. Now look back in your life and think about all the time you avoided hard work in the hope that your specialness would just do the work for you. Kids should avoid these kind of movies, at least until they are 18 or may be 21.

Lord of the Rings? The main character fell backwards into an assignment and stumbled his way through. He wasn’t born great and had no special powers.

Most of our media, especially mainstream, isn't that on the nose with tropes. If you go for e.g. anime, you'll fine an entire genre of "looser viewers can emphasis with suddenly finds himself in another world were he is the greatest". Isekai, in short. Some of those shows are great. But mostly absent is having to work hard for success. Probably cause it would ruin the power fantasy.

Harry potter also employs this trope in the beginning. But builds upon it beyond the wish fulfillment.

LotR? He literally inherited the ring and was pushed into the adventure. It gets better from there, but his past doesn't really matter. If mentioned, I can't remember anything except some reason for the other hobbits to tag along. Could have happened to anyone. It certainly doesn't convey any kind of message like "you have to work hard to find great adventures in life". No reason not to enjoy a movie/show/franchise, but should probably not be entirely absent from a media diet, either.

Sadly the majority of sociologists still seems to believe the debunked theory of nurture over nature[1] and tend to ignore all things biology. Consequently, a lot of gender related studies are just ideology instead of robust science.

In the last decades STEM enrollment for girls rose in poor countries. And Disney movies are watched worldwide, including poor countries...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/29/so-is-it-nat...

Yeah, as science I have serious doubts about sociology. As a way to form an ontology it's plausibly worse than vernacular tradition. Please prove me wrong and point me to high quality sociological studies. I want to believe we have practical tools to deal with the future of our species.

How about https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/521848

Applied graph theory? I don't have access to full article so I can't tell if it's actual math or something more hand-wavy stuff.

Here's a non-paywalled version. https://ndg.asc.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Centola...

This is just an example of a well-known recent sociology paper that can appeal to science-minded people unfamiliar with sociology.

By the way, it's a danger to rely too much on mathematical formalism as a heuristic for deciding whether a research field is scientific or valid. String theory for example lacks empirical evidence (and maybe even the possibility of empirical validation altogether).

In general I agree. However many studies in this field had been large scale enough with low variance that effect is not ignorable. Given similar results, it appears reproducibility is also high.

No. Disney movies are watched lot less in 3rd world countries. Most population in these countries didn't had (perhaps recently) any on-demand access to large movie collection - not as VCRs, DVDs or streaming. You gets to watch movie if it is on the cable at the time you are watching. This significantly reduces exposure and tendency to watch same kind of movies over and over. Also, market for expensive Disney toys and accessories isn't accessible to most people.

Correlation does not equal causation. If there is a trend in society driving girls toward traditional roles, then would not it be equally plausible that this phenomena is driving both the narrative of popular films as well as decrease in STEM participation.

I have only anecdotal sample size of one - but my daughter loves disney female characters, and she enjoys maths and sciences as well. Her mother has a PhD in physics so there is that as well, so... we're not exactly a good 'average sample'. But I've never got the vibe that she would not enjoy maths because the little mermaid doesn't.

Societies are driven by fashions that trickle down from perceived elite to the rest of the society. It's much more 'damaging' if there are popular celebrities setting the 'wrong' example, rather than if Ariel is not into STEM.

I know it's popular to blame big corps for all the woes of the world, but non-interactive entertainment is not harmfull on the same scale as social media or tobacco.

I hope things works out for you. Having a mom with PhD makes huge difference in balancing things out but these studies are not bogus. They have proper sample size, metrics, control group and there is high probability that hypothesis is plausible. I've seen several parents buy Disney Princess book set, movie set, doll set to their daughters. My heart often sinks. It's an extremely popular Christmas gift unfortunately and marketed with vengeance like nothing else. It's like a tradition of pregnant women painting baby room. They don't know they are inhaling potentially very dangerous fumes for fetus for hours on that can potentially lead to various birth defects including autism and asperger. Not all kids gets affected but some do.

I'm sorry but you are out an outlier. Most girls have pink princess things and get told they look pretty in that dress and do jigsaw puzzles made of Disney princesses. I wish all girls had roles models like your daughter but it's just not the reality. (Source: woman with many friends with daughters)

Yeah, I'm quite confident our family is an outlier. Our daughter is a huge disney princess fan, loves barbies but I don't see it affecting her love of STEM.

I have a hunch it's not the disney princesses that stifle young girls but just being told at some point in their lives that science is more for boys. You don't need more than that. Once you have a bunch of young girls, each of which have internalized this at some point in their life, it becomes part of their 'subconscious group identity' and that's that.

I think it's ok for girls to love princesses. It's not ok for their role models (mums) say so that they hear "i don't understand maths but that's ok" or something silly like that.

Kids learn rules from adults. Not from cartoons.

In my experience cartoons are hugely impactful but I only have anecdotes, I'm sure there are good studies out there to refute or support us both =)

Yeah, sometimes they get funny ideas from toons. I've found out I can 'defuse' those situations by joining the narrative and then going full on Roahl Dahl and suggesting something outrageous, which in turn puts the kid into a mode where they figure things out on a more philosophical level. I actually say things like "Yeah, the princess has a nice castle. I'm sure her father sure enslaved lots of people to build it" and they go like "that's horrible! No, um, let me think... I'm sure it was built by paid professionals!" Etc. Kids don't get damaged if you insert a little bit of cognitive wiggle room to their favourite narratives :)

It's in the same vein as the princess issues but Freakonomics did a solid podcast on this recently too http://freakonomics.com/podcast/princess/

Little kids don't need new programming.

Expose your kids to physical comedy trough silent black and white classics. Young children love them and watch them again and again. Adults love them too. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and many others.

With plenty of disclaimers to not imitate Buster Keaton, I hope

Silent films are great even if a kid can't follow the title cards. Without dialogue, so much of the story is told through the action and expressions of the actors.

While not silent, as a child I spent many a weekend morning watching The Three Stooges on our local PBS channel.

I wish there was a way to convey woo woo woo via emoji. Maybe some sort of Homer/Zoidberg gif?

Correlation is not causation. Everyone watched Disney movies as a kid.

There's no study that supports post 2000 content does anything to improve things.

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