As a future teacher, it’s important to make a good relationship with your students, and part of that relationship is understanding your students and thinking like them. And what better way to tap into your inner child than watching television shows and movies children are watching. So thanks to Netflix, I spent the past month selecting shows from the kids’ section.

My initial plan was to just watch only kids’ movies and shows to understand the general ideas these movie producers are paying for. I thought I’d be able to go a whole month with being able to watch movies off the kids’ section alone because I already like to watch the kids’ shows and movies that I grew up on. But that wasn’t the case at all. A week into my “project,” I was so tired of it that I needed a mature show to watch. This is how the four weeks laid out.

During the first week, I was having a blast. I was revisiting all the movies that I had watched when I was a little kid, like The Land Before Time and The Brave Little Toaster. And then I started watching Disney films they played on their television channel, like High School Musical, The Cheetah Girls, Jump In!, and so on. After I had watched the main Disney movies, I decided I wanted to watch some new movies that children of today would know like the back of their hand. And that’s where I made the mistake.

I watched the movie Home, which had a world of aliens clashing with the world of humans. Oh boy was it weird. I had never watched anything like this during my childhood, but surprisingly, after being sort of used to it, I slightly enjoyed it. But everything in the film was its own kind of weird and was so out there.

After that single movie, I went to watching Pretty Little Liars because I was so over how childish that movie was. And I get it, it was childish because it is for children, but it was abnormally childish. I make a general statement when I say that children’s programming shows and movies today are so extra. They feature so many unnecessary elements to “keep the show interesting” but from what I see, I feel like it’s ruining a child’s natural ability to focus. I might not make sense now, but if you were to see a children’s movie right now, it would be more understandable.

In short, I haven’t gone back to watching another children’s movie since watching Home. My only exception was Finding Dory, but it's a given that I had to watch it. But Home wasn’t bad of a movie at all; it was just too extra and the way the characters acted aren’t necessarily something I’d want my child to see. Maybe I’m just being super weird about things, but I disagree with a lot of what they do in these new shows.