I never wanted to be THAT parent.

I had to yell at Andrew's daycare today. OK, I didn't actually yell, per se, but I did voice my displeasure strongly.

Yesterday Andrew came home from school and told us that he watched a monster movie that afternoon. Now, we've been getting frustrated with the amount of time his class has been spending in front of the TV lately and were teetering on mentioning that to the director. We pressed him further to find out what kind of monster movie they showed his class. He calls Sesame Street character monsters, so it could be anything.

"Cars," he said.

Cars doesn't have any monsters.

"Cars and monsters."

"Huh?" we replied.

"Cars turn into monsters!" was his, shall we say, impassioned response.

"Transformers?!"

"Yeah, transformers."

I went into the living room and pulled out my copy of the DVD (as yet unopened, unfortunately) and asked him if that was the movie.

"Yeah!" He points to Optimus Prime and mentions the blue truck that turned into a monster, then points to Bumblebee and mentions the yellow car that turned into a monster.

Shocked, we asked if he liked the movie.

"No, it scared me."

"Did you tell Miss Shiloh (his teacher)?"

"No, I cried. I cried at school."

"Because you were scared?"

"Yeah."

At this point I'm fuming. That's hardly an appropriate movie to show to three- and four-year-olds. Just to be sure I checked the back of the DVD. Yup, it's PG-13 for violence and sexual dialog.

This morning (4/11) I had Liz ask his teacher if they actually watched the movie yesterday (not that he'd come into contact with those characters any other way) and she confirmed that one of his classmates brought it in for the whole class to watch.

I finally got a chance to talk to them when I picked the kids up this evening. The Director was out of the office, so I had the chance to talk to the Assistant Director about it. She seemed genuinely surprised that they had watched that movie and assured me that, not only would they not watch anything like that again, but also that the TV was slated to be removed very soon. She also promised to talk to Andrew's teacher about the incident. I felt that was sufficient for the time being, but insisted that, even though we had just paid our registration fee, I would not hesitate to throw that money away if I felt this was going to happen again.

We'll see how this goes.

(c) 2008 Scott Everett