In a post on my review of
Little Miss Sunshine on They Might Be Critics, Wicked Little Critta writes: "the young actress [is] exposed to a bunch of stuff I'd never want my daughter to see."
And the question of what the young daughter should or shouldn't see or hear comes up in the movie as well. When her Uncle Frank comes to live with the family shortly after his suicide attempt, young Olive notices the bandages on his wrists and asks him--with childish innocence and genuine concern--how he got hurt.
This question splits the family into two different camps: One camp, manned solely by the father, feels that Olive is too young to hear about such unpleasant matters as suicide, and he insists Frank not tell Olive. The other camp, which includes pretty much everyone else, feels Olive is old enough not to be lied to.
The way this scene comes about in the movie, the father is presumed to be clearly in the wrong, with the message being that we do more harm to children by protecting them from ugly truths by lying to them than would be done by simply allowing them to hear the ugly truths.
But what do you guys think? Is it better to protect children from ugly truths until they're old enough to hear them? Or is it better to let them hear these unpleasant thing than to lie to them?
Obviously, this is a nuanced debate: It's unlikely anyone would deliberately show their three-year-old scenes of rape for truth's sake alone, and at the same time few people develop elaborate webs of lies to protect their children from all unpleasantness, only to destroy that web when the child comes of age.
But what if we put you in the father's shoes in
Little Miss Sunshine. Would you allow her to hear the truth about your brother-in-law's suicide attempt? Would you tell her a fabrication or a half-truth to protect her from the ugly nature of the incident? Would you quickly change the subject and hope the matter was forgotten about? Or would you do something else entirely?
