I will forever and always remember when I got in trouble for saying my first curse word. I was in kindergarten, and one day was trying peel a pear I’d picked from a tree in our backyard when I commented “this pear is as hard as a damn rock.”

My mother, in the next room asked me what I said and I repeated it, innocently wondering why she had that look on her face. I was sent to my room and told never to use such language again.

Damn was just a word I’d heard some big kids use on the school bus, and I think I was throwing it in there to sound like a big kid myself. I had no idea it was not permitted in my house, even though I’d never used it heard there. (I can still count on one hand the times I’ve heard my mother curse, and one of those was when she got her finger under the needle of the sewing machine!)

I got to thinking about all this again recently after we spent a family movie night watching Julie & Julia. It was a PG-13 movie with no nudity or violence, but there was a scene where two women talk about being a bitch, and there’s one (really unnecessary) use of the F-word.

I don’t like my girl to hear bad language, but there’s only so many G-rated movies out there (the only ones I think you can count on to not have bad language, it seems lately) and the story was a good one.

My course of action for dealing with this sort of thing has always been to point out to her the words that are not acceptable in our house - so that she will avoid the fate I had of not knowing I was doing anything my parents thought wrong. But, I have to wonder, if hearing that language too often makes it “not a big deal” and therefore all the more acceptable for her to use when she wants to be a “big kid.”

I really began to think about this the next morning as I heard my husband discussing the topic with his mother and saying that “bitch” is becoming not such a bad word anymore.

I pondered … it wasn’t that long ago that my girl was learning at preschool and grade school that “stupid” was a bad word. If she and her playmates heard someone use it, they reacted as if they’d said something horrible. Is this the same society that will come to feel that bitch is a socially acceptable word to use to describe someone? 

No matter that I tell her differently, or even that I model it by not cursing in front of her, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker says that children are far more influenced by their peers.

And they will be influenced by what they see and hear on television and movies. Heaven help us when it’s foul-mouthed kids like the character Hit-Girl in the recent movie “Kick-Ass.”

What’s a parent to do?

Image via Creative Commons by Carolyn Tiry.

Two coming attractions at the movie theater are based on books that both my girl and I have enjoyed reading - “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.”

“Where the Wild Things Are” was a book that I read in my own childhood and a fellow bibliophile I used to work with (thanks Leslie) made sure my child got the chance to read it, too, by including it in a baby shower gift. The “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” book came a little late for me, but my librarian mother introduced it to my girl and she and I both enjoyed it.

Now, bringing a book to the movie screen has always been fraught with danger. Everyone who has read a book has their own ideas about how the characters look, so casting can get a lot of fan input or backlash (Tom Cruise as Lestat anyone?). Storylines often get changed to meet a perceived desire of audiences to always have happy endings (think “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “The Scarlet Letter“). Sometimes entire characters are dropped or added, which frustrated me in “Angels and Demons,” despite the fact that I can understand things need to be edited sometimes to squeeze an entire book into a couple of hours of screen time.

That difficulty of making the in-depth short is probably the most common cause of changes that frustrate book lovers who see the movies based on them. But what of short childrens’ books that need to be expanded to make them long enough for a movie? Does that make it any easier for adaptation? I’m thinking not based strictly on my own mixed feelings about these two new movies.

It appears that they have expanded Cloudy primarily by adding a story in front of the story - giving the audience a tale of how the food first came to fall from the sky in the town of Chewandswallow - and I think this will work nicely.

But, from what I can tell from the fantastic Wild Things trailers, the 10 sentences of the original story are getting a lot of filler in between them - thus potentially changing the story a bit more. The live-action attempt at The Grinch Who Stole Christmas tried doing both and I don’t think the results were very spectacular there.

Obviously aware that I’m not the only one a bit leery of this, the studio has made a point to include original Wild Things author Maurice Sendak in many publicity events and he has been reporting saying the “Wild Things Movie Will Be Okay” as well as promising the “Wild Things Movie Will Be Dark and Controversial.”

Hmm…

Either way, I will probably see both movies. Not needing an excuse to watch kids’ movies, after all, is one of the perks of this mommy gig, right? And, while I will definitely enter the Wild Things theater with trepidation and concern that the book will never read the same for me again, I bet this trailer makes you want to see more, too.

(The Arcade Fire song on this Wild Things trailer really helps inspire a sense of wonder and the desire to see it - too bad word is it won’t be in the actual movie.)

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• Childhood Memories Coming to a Theater Near You (firstbook.org)
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• Jonze And Sendak Meeting Like Something From A Spike Jonze Movie (cinemablend.com)