One Great Solution for Teen Movie Nights-moving beyond Disney!

Do you teens ever ask to watch a movie? Mine do-and more than once a week-which puts me in an interesting parenting position of "What out there is appropriate for my teens?"

For quite a while, my husband and I suggested great older movies that we had seen. Once we worked our way through many of the classics and musicals, we decided to move into movies we had watched as teens.

Granted, we, both being products of the 1980's, have quite a repertoire of movies stored away in that 90% of the subconscious part of our brains. But somehow, those older 80's movies had a load of really inappropriate "stuff" in them-that we didn't remember! This fact would have been useful BEFORE renting the movies, which while viewing usually turned into a feat of unbelievable dexterity by myself or Todd to block the screen with our bodies while trying to turn it off!

Actually, one we were really disappointed in was "Back to the Future" and only made it through the first 13 minutes before my kids were all holding their ears because of the cursing and swearing.

Fortunately, after those trials, we were able to find quite a few different websites that gave parental advisories about movie content. The one we currently use is Internet Movie Data Base www.imdb.com After you type in the title of the movie you are searching for, you scroll down to "Additional Details" and then click on "View content advisory for parents" and it will list EVERYTHING from foul language to insinuated sex to extreme violence.

Now-where do you go from here? What if you know the movie has a really great message or historical significance but if it just left out "THAT SCENE"? This is where it gets really good. There is a DVD player out there made just for homeschool families-well, I am not sure it was made just for homeschool families but it was made just for my family. It is called ClearPlay and it is an answer to prayer because you can choose from a menu which "things" you want it to filter out. I usually put it on "filter all" and even the "Oh my God"s are left out.

It costs around $80.00 and you can check it out on line at www.clearplay.com

The Sylvester Teens use our ClearPlay to watch all of their movies now

(and so do the Sylvester parents)!

If you are wondering if it really works I'll tell you this little story. It was hysterical once when Todd and I rented the movie "Dodgeball". Because of the ClearPlay filtering, it was only 55 minutes long!

Happy movie watching! I hope all of this info helps.

Peace of Christ,

Angelle