Courtesy Discovery Networks
I was telling my husaband about Monsters Inside Me, Animal Planet’s new series premiering tonight at 9 p.m. The show is about parasites and parasitic disease and is about as gross as you can imagine. My husband certainly did.
“Yuck,” he said. “The eleven-year-olds are going to love it.”
And that may be the point. It’s one thing to understand intellectually that the affinity for gross-out stuff that sets in around the ages of 10 to 12 is an early part of the onset of adolescense and part of the whole separation process that turns your dependent child into a functioning independent adult. It’s another thing when all of a sudden your sweet little tyke starts laughing uproariously at the same poop jokes that you laughed at back in the day. It’s jarring, trust me.
And, no, those jokes weren’t funny when we were kids and they still aren’t. We’ve just grown up. Your kids haven’t yet, and that is also the point. Ang there is little that is charming about a tween sense of humor. Nor is there much that is charming about Monsters Inside Me.
The good news is that the show, while gross and disgusting and big on the EEEEUW! side of things, also has some decent information. The narration is only moderately hyped up – you don’t get a lot of relentless repetion regarding this bug doing that specific thing – although you do hear a fair amount commentary on how deadly parasites can be. You also hear fairly frequently how uncommon most of these events are. In fact, that’s one of the biggest problems in each of the case studies – because the disease is so rare, it’s very hard to diagnose.
If you have younger kids or a particularly sensitive child, you might want to find a way to find something else for them to do while you watch with your tween. The show can be pretty scary. In fact, I’ve been fighting off the heebie jeebies, myself, since I saw it. But then, I passed eleven a long time ago.
Anne Louise Bannon
Your Family Viewer
