What level of media were you not allowed to watch as a kid?

When I was a younger kid, there was a general understanding that we didn't watch R-rated movies in my parents' house. It was something that I don't think was enforced especially stringently, but it also wasn't hard because I didn't seek a lot of that stuff out until my mid-teens (at which point my parents didn't really care all that much as long as it wasn't full of sex.)

Before I was 11-12 years old or so, I just didn't really care about movies or age ratings in any meaningful way. And parent's didn't really have much like that on TV very often. So I was generally just not exposed to R-rated things and also didn't seek them out or care.

After that when I took more of an interest I could watch kind of whatever I wanted. Games were even less enforced than that. I would've been 11 or so when GTA: San Andreas came out, and only a year later for the first God of War. Soooooo, you know.

I was watching Spawn: The Animated series and Spicy City as a toddler and I think I turned out alright. The part where Overtkill rips that homeless guy's arm off scared the fuck out of me.

@cure_optimism: Cartoons, eh? I remember watching Fritz the Cat at maybe 13 or 14 at my friend’s place. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at the time.

The only cartoon that ever messed with me was Inhumanoids. That show was some scary shit to me at 6 years old:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jDKyL6y7FZ8

I don't recall my mom denying me to see any movie based on the rating. I don't know if she was savvy enough to pay attention. The filter was ticket sellers when I was under age.

But there was the Ralph Bakshi movie "Wizards" that my step dad had in Betamax at his cabin. Whenever we went there she hid it, but I knew where. I watched it anyway in the morning while they slept.

I can't recall many R rated things I wanted to watch. Unless they were animated. I very sneakily watched Heavy Metal when it was on TV. And other kids exposed me to things like porn and the first scene of Robocop.

I wasn't allowed to play most M rated games until I was about 14. Even some T rated games were off limits when I was 10/under.

My mom was cool with South Park, not cool with Family Guy. Weird right?

I wasnt allowed to watch Power Rangers because my mom heard it was bad. That was the drawing line, if my mom heard it was bad for kids she wouldn't let me watch it. If she hadn't heard it was bad, I was allowed, including any R-rated movies like the time I just walked in the living room while my parents watched Lethal Weapon and that was just okay.

Violence didn't matter, sex mattered even less, and nudity didn't matter at all. As a young kid between (6 and 10) I saw "Apocalypse Now" on laser disc, "Summer Lovers" with Daryl Hannah on video, "Pulp Fiction" on video, "Titanic" in the theater twice, "Saving Private Ryan" in the theater, "Eyes Wide Shut" in the theater, and "The Matrix" in the theater. Also, I was allowed to play any video game I wanted; however, that was probably because my parents didn't really understand what video games were. For a point of reference I was born in 1989. In my opinion, today's parents need to lighten up.

Mortal Monday, the day Mortal Kombat hit consoles...

Actually, three days earlier everyone broke street date. I was 12. My friend stayed the weekend. My mom heard about the street date being broken and got us MK on Genesis.

Baller.

Basically just pornography. Violence and swearing was a non-issue, nudity was tolerated.

Only thing that my parents made me stop watching was Jason X.

By the time I was 9 I had seen, to name just a few: Robocop, Predator, Die Hard, Terminator 1 + 2 and A Nightmare on Elm Street. I had also beaten GTA 3.

There was this show in Belgium called Matroesjka's which was about Russian sex trafficking in Belgium ( fiction) that i was not allowed to watch! for the rest i could watch almost everything.

I could always watch R rated films, but I couldn't always play specific M rated games (even though my brothers and I always did).

@max_cherry: Eyes Wide Shut must have been boring as shit as a 10 year old!

Porn was pretty much the only thing I wasn't supposed to see. I grew up on stuff like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem.

South Park & wrestling were the only things I wasn't allowed to watch.

I mean... I think most parents know that the whole rating system for games and movies is more arbitrary than anything. Would my parents let me play something like GTA when I was 9? God no... but Halo? It's a pretty cartoony looking game that happens to have blood in it. I remember I even managed to talk them into letting me play Splinter Cell Chaos Theory because that's when the series turned M.

With movies it was kind of a mix bag. My dad and my brother didn't really care as much and I remember at an early age being exposed to movies like Alien/Aliens and other 80s action movies with my brother. My mom was the most concerned with stuff that I was watching and would get more on my dad or me about "WHY ARE YOU WATCHING THAT" kind of thing. That being said, anime for whatever reason was incredibly deceptive because she believed that since it was a cartoon, it can't be that bad. So I got to watch Cowboy Bebop when I was around 7 or 8.... which had some pretty disturbing episodes.

But like the option says, I think I turned out all right despite the "early" introduction to more violent media content. I mean at the end of the day it's very much still good guys vs bad guys/things, so I don't think it affected my moral compass at all as a kid. I think that relating violent games to violence in people is a pretty dumb argument... not sure how scientific this it, but there has to be some proof that when playing games you're working more on the problem solving of your brain than your willingness to actually kill someone.

The one that I think shapes people the most is the type of violence that you are exposed to and what the portrayal of it is. For example, something like Game of Thrones is something that I would never show a child, because it depicts so much violence and often enough there's some sadistic theme behind the violence that is supposed to be "shocking" because the "good guys" dont make it and the bad guys do. That's just my personal opinion of it, I'm sure most would argue that this is a more "real" interpretation of life, but I think that kids should be exposed to more fantastical ideas than "real" ones.

I remember one particular event that indicated how I was raised versus others was when I visited an air and space museum and I was walking around with my dad around a B-25. He's an engineer so, his appreciation for planes and jets goes more into the sheer engineering of it and joy of flight. The very idea that these hulking machines can fly is what makes them cool and that's how it was passed down to me. Now, some Joe and son are standing underneath the bomb bay of this thing, and this guy is saying how many bombs this thing can hold and how many people this aircraft can kill. I remember me and my dad after that were kind like.... sheesh... it may be true that these were used for warfare, but what a sadistic way to explain that to your kid by explaining its killing capacity.

Dad worked nights so he didn't have much input on this, the simple rule that my Mum applied in my early teens was that I wouldn't be in front of the TV after nine in the evening. It made sense because that was known as "the watershed" on UK TV which meant very little swearing / nudity etc. I remember being a bit annoyed about not being able to watch TV shows, mainly comedy, that the kids in school were watching (and all the memes as they were then). I basically spent that time reading horror books, which I don't think was their intended outcome.

Edit: Looking at the subject title again for context, Games weren't something they knew anything about but they said the computer wasn't for playing games on (education only). One year later I was still playing games and they trusted me to make my own decisions on that.

If the blood isn't red, parents are often cool with it, weirdly. Halo never had blood blood, but alien blood, right?

I wasn't allowed to watch R rated movies, generally, until I was like 16. I didn't listen to any secular music until I was around 14 or 15. As far as the "rating" on games, my parents never really cared.

No nudity / sex was the standard for my parents as well.. As a kid in the 80s it was generally totally cool to watch R rated action movies at like 6-7 (assuming someone fast forwarded the sex scenes), and they made toys for Rambo / Robocop / Terminator / other R rated movies aimed totally at kids. By 13ish I could watch basically anything.

Games didn't have ratings when I was a kid. I was in middle school by the time Mortal Kombat and stuff came out and by that time I didn't have any restrictions.

I turned out OK I think, but it makes me very bad at determining what should be OK for kids now.

@sammo21: Yeah, when it comes to music my mom was pretty harsh. For a while it was no music with swearing but as I got into more metal and stuff she cracked down even harder and didn't want me listening to "dark" music.

I wasn't allowed to play M games until I got to... middle school, I think? I don't remember, actually. A lot of the games I wanted to play weren't even rated M, for whatever reason. I really wanted to play Halo back then but I didn't have an Xbox and money was real tight during that part of my childhood so new games were few and far between anyway.

As far as movies go, it seemed to depend on the day. Sometimes it seemed like my parents were OK with anything. Sometimes they wouldn't let me even watch The Matrix. I wound up watching a lot of anime on Adult Swim instead of movies, and I still watch more anime than I do movies (and I don't even watch much anime). My mom was adamant that horror movies never enter her house, so I never saw anything particularly scary and I'm still just not that interested in horror movies.

Pretty much all of this loosened up when I got to high school. Suddenly they didn't care all that much anymore - but by that time I was more interested in music, video games, and the occasional book than I was in movies or TV shows.

When I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to watch Animaniacs. Goddamn Animaniacs. My father forbade me from listening to AC/DC because it was all screamy stuff to him. Thankfully, I didn't adopt their views and got to experience what I missed out on down the line.

@dichemstys: I’m being 100% honest here when I say that if I were 12-17 and NOT allowed to listen to certain music, I’d have moved out.

I say this as someone who was raised pretty much free range from 13 onward, just as long as I checked in once in a while (daily, maybe every couple of days).

@doubleplusrad: I mean, if you have kids, you walk that line. Everyone, kids and adults, has things they’re sensitive to, scared of, don’t handle well, whatever.

If you’re an attentive parent (not helicopter, but just paying attention to your kid, their behavior, their habits, interactions, etc,), you pretty much know.

Sometimes you let things go a little too far and let them test their limits. Sometimes that’s fine, other times it’s not. You figure it out as time goes on.

As for other people’s kids, that’s on them. Personally, I’m not showing an R-rated movie to my kids’ friends without their parents being aware. Their kid, their rules.

It was inconsistent, but rule of thumb was no R ratings with a few exceptions if the R was "soft" enough, no Ren & Stimpy/Beavis & Butthead/Simpsons (no Simpsons simply because my grandfather didn't like that Bart called his dad "Homer"... we owned and I was allowed to watch the Christmas special, however, and I had a cassette of Simpsons Sing The Blues that nobody objected to). Weirdly, Rocko's Modern Life was a-okay.

One movie double standard that still makes me laugh a bit: Jurassic Park? Nope. Too violent. Terminator 2? Go for it. (the JP ban didn't last very long, thankfully... like, only as long as it took to hit home video)

Games were generally a free-for-all, since nobody in the house really paid particularly close attention to the content of, say, Wolfenstein 3D, and this was the time in which the prevailing thought on video games was "kids' entertainment". (which is funny, because I know my grandfather played Leisure Suit Larry back then)

Now, once I was at a friend's house? All bets were off, as is tradition. Always had to have that one friend who had cable in his room and lax censorship rules.

Is there a poll choice for 'Could watch pretty much anything but MTV?' cuz that was me.

@chamurai: Anything but MTV? So...MTV was VERY different from the 80s to the first half of the 90s. Once Carson Daily hit the scene, I checked out.

What era were you referring to? Anything but MTV strikes me as “NC-17 is cool, just don’t watch PG-13 movies.”

@shagge: I think my kids have seen Jurassic Park...I know my oldest watched Terminator 2 with us when he was eight.

Terminator 2, without the swearing, is really tame. It’s non-stop action, but it’s mostly people getting injured by bullets...John Connor’s foster parents and maybe a guard or two notwithstanding. That movie actually talks about the value of life and what it means to love and be human quite a bit. It’s a really interesting shift from Terminator 1, which was basically framed like a horror movie.

For my kids, I’d be more worried about Jurassic Park scaring them than Terminator 2. A lot of Jurrasic Park is formulated like a horror movie, albeit one that’s a summer blockbuster that’s made for most ages.

My mother went to China for a month with her works when I was 12, so my dad finally let me watch Platoon. That was the one film she didn't want me to see.

Games, TV, and movies were fairly monitored. Books however were left wide open. At 12 I wasn't able to play Goldeneye for another year, but had no problem getting the Silence of the Lambs book.

When left to my own devices, I would obviously watch anything. I used to stay with my uncles a lot when I was a kid and they had a massive VHS collection and I would watch violent stuff from time to time. My uncle even took to me R-rated movies when I was in primary school.

At home though, I wasn't allowed to watch or play stuff with excessive profanity, violence or sexual content. My mom would check every single game to see if it contained inappropriate content, regardless of the rating. I had to resell a lot of stuff.

My mom refused to let me watch Dragon Ball Z and when my dad saw me playing Goldeneye, he immediately ripped the cartridge out of the N64 and threw it in the trash. (My brothers and I sneaked to the garbage later that night and retrieved it.) I had to play the GTA games at my friend's house and if my parents had found out, they'd not let me go over there anymore. Rated-R was a concern for them until I was like 13 and then they stopped caring as much.

I wasn't allowed to watch The Simpsons until I was maybe 13 or 14. I remember it changed because my Grandmother used to let me watch it when I stayed with here, and after having watched a few of them, my mum relented and I was able to watch after that. South Park was something I watched on the sly (and, I understand this being restricted).

Other than that there were not many restrictions. Bloodsport (which should not be R18+ to begin with, though it was over here in Aus), was regular viewing from 13 onwards.

I had pretty much free reign on watching whatever, I remember going through the entire Manga anime movie stash my local blockbuster had, all you had to do was peel off the orange sticker and you were home free and as far as my parents cared devil man might as well have been bugs bunny.

No video game consoles until I was 11 though, so I missed out on the SNES and Genesis wave having to settle for playing at friends' on occasion. My folks tried I guess but eventually I probably wore them down using baseball as the key to the video game kingdom. I pretended to be super into baseball so I could also pretend to really want some MLB game for PSX, and after a trip to funcoland, that blockbuster down the street was like a treasure trove refreshed all the way through the ps2 and xbox early days before I moved away. Memorieees.

Pretty much anything but I didn't, and still don't, watch much TV

I wasn’t allowed to watch porn

Born in '94 here, I honestly just think my parents were kinda outta the loop on new media at the time. I.e. not allowing me to watch the Simpsons when I was like 8, me playing GTA at a friends house and them founding out felt like if they found out I did meth, having to have my dad buy me the M rated games secretly. I don't blame them, they were raising 3 children and working to support us so all they saw were the hyper-sensationalized news reports of the late 90's/early-mid 2000's of video games and movies corrupting the youth. But they, as most parents do, eased up over time; still sticking to their conventions until some time when I was around when I was 12-13, putting up the false fight just so they could tell themselves they tried. Ultimately, especially today, kids will be exposed to the stuff.

I was allowed to watch anything except a game show imported from Italy where women opened up their bikinis to reveal a number taped to their nipples for men to play black jack and contestants had to try to not be excited as a woman grinded on him to try to make his heart rate go faster which was measured by a machine. I was 8 at the time but I still watched the show with my cousins who were around 14-16 at the time. The women had themes like Miss blueberry, miss strawberry etc. This was in the mid 90's.

I was allowed to watch almost everything and depending on what my kids is like I would allow my kids to watch almost everything too. I'm not going to be too stingy with that stuff. I played some scary games as a little kid and had a couple nightmares. Guess what... they're just nightmares. It was real-life that was scary for real. Movies and games are fake.

It does depend on the kids. You don't want to traumatize them. Some can't handle it, some can. So I would be careful at first. But I am grateful that they let me explore media. So I want to let my kids do the same.

I borrowed Resident Evil Director's Cut from a friend when I was maybe 8 or so and my dad immediately made me take it back. I think that order came from my mom because my dad was usually super liberal about that stuff.

@nutter: 1994 was when we first got cable at my place. My dad took me to rated-R movies all the time, no problem but apparently MTV didn't teach anything so was off limits? I never really understood where he was coming from but yeah.

@chamurai: I guess MTV still had a couple of years before settling in to pop music and parent-pleasing.

1994 was Nine Inch Nails’ Closer video, I think, with Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up, Apex Twin’s Come to Daddy, and a bunch of Marilyn Manson still to come by ‘95 to ‘96, if I remember right.

Gangsta rap was a thing at that time, too.

@nutter: Yeah, it seems like the daring rock videos getting played on MTV ended around '96 or '97.

I was recently told that when I was a small child (1-3 years old) my mother used to put me down infront of the TV and put on Rosemary's baby and robocop and I would just sit there and shut up for the length of ether... it explains a lot.