Children are influenced by far more than we parents tend to appreciate. Unless you plan to home school your children AND cut them off from social media and other forms of pop-culture (including television and radio), there's a good chance your child is being influenced in ways you are only marginally aware of. It's a delicate balance trying to decide age-appropriate content to expose them to, but at some point, time simply does not allow for all the hand-holding that was possible prior to your children enrolling at school.
One example of this was when my children wanted to watch movies. Rather than worrying about endless discs and packages that would otherwise be ruined by the less-than-careful handling of my children, I built a server complete with media hubs they can control themselves. I may have given them access to age-appropriate content that they could peruse at their leisure, but I'm not enough of a micro-manager to look at which content they tend to play more often than others.
Sometimes, their consumption habits will spill over in unexpected ways. When my son was five, for example, he was constantly testing our creativity with respect to motivation. On one morning, as we were getting ready to leave for an overdue play-date with some family friends, my wife and I, as is often the case, were searching for that elusive button that needed to be pressed to light the proverbial fire under his backside.
"Hurry!" His mother advised him, "You don't want to be late to see everyone, do you?" She asked, shaking her head. "That means we won't be able to spend as much time with them."
"No," he responded with atypical calmness, "I don't want to be late to the tea party."
Of course you don't, except — tea party?! Apparently, my children had been consuming copious amounts of "Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010)."
So it was that we went to our Tea Party. The instant the door was opened to allow us entry into our friends' home, my son, ignoring the need for pleasantries, rushed across the threshold first and gleefully announced, "I'm here!"
Of course you are. Needless to say, he caught everyone off-guard ... again.
