I agree with you that at the age of 12 or 13, a kid can start to enjoy more adult faire. I was referring to younger children when I was talking about a "no brainer," specifically kids under 10 years old. I also agree with you that juvenile thinking is no way to treat a kid. I also grew up on Nova, Cosmos, and Nature on PBS, as well as Mr. Wizard, Bill Nye, and a bunch of other science-themed youth shows. My kids enjoy the same kind of programming.

I also think it's important to know your kids and what they can handle. My 6-year old got really scared watching Toy Story 3. My 8-year old doesn't like movies with a lot of yelling because he likes it when people get along. I try to make sure that when we go out as a family, we do things that everybody enjoys. I'm not going to force violence or sex on my kids in the hopes that it makes them more intellectual or cosmopolitan. I'm not trying to make judgments about whether adult movies are right or wrong. My point is that everybody has choices to make. Right now, America has more people choosing to watch family-friendly media. I would love to see more gritty, thought-provoking fantasies and dramas. However, if the market won't bear that kind of media, I'm not going to get mad at all the people with kids who don't support me. Saying that movie studios should ignore basic economics in favor of art makes no business sense. If fans and producers want more adult movies to be made, then its on them to be smart enough to pay for it.

First, let me say that I enjoyed Watchmen. However, I streamed it on Netflix and watched it at home alone because my wife and kids do not share my desire to watch that kind of film. What people fail to realize when shopping a high-budget, non-family movie is the economics of the thing. In America today, the big money is not found attracting the 18-25 year crowd; those kind of people will go buy a single ticket for themselves - especially when it comes to sci-fi or fantasy, which aren't traditional "date" genres. The money is with the middle-aged couple with kids, who go and buy 4-6 tickets as a family event and represent a larger portion of the market. If the movie is good enough, it will appeal to the young adults as well who will go by themselves, on dates, and with their friends. When you give a movie an R rating, you eliminate a large portion of the potential market. It's like why there's not a lot of money to be made making desktop software for the Mac (outside of graphic-design), and why there's no real market for Mac games (since only a very small portion of home users have Macs).

Movie makers may try to defend their choices, saying that they have to push the envelope to create "adult" entertainment that has psychological, societal, or artistic merit. This is fine with me. However as a parent of young children, I have to make choices as well. I have to choose how to spend my limited entertainment budget: do I expose my children to media that will challenge or disturb them, or do I have a good time with my kids? For me, it's a no-brainer. If the studios want my money, they have to pander to my entertainment needs. If a director wants to make an "erotic space opera," let him fund it himself or find a market that will pay him to do it. It really boils down to the basic market principles of supply and demand.

On if you trust them alone on the internet or not. As you can see above, that question is fraught with peril and controversy. I'll just give you my technical opinions and let you decide what's best for your kids :) Option 1: My kids need very tight supervision on the Internet Solution: Use "plus addressing" to create an address for your kids attached to yours. Email systems ignore anything that comes before the @ symbol and after a "+" symbol. So if your email is bob@domain.net then you will also get anything addressed to bob+cindy@domain.net, bob+joe@domail.net, or bob+prettymuchanythingthatcanbeinanaddress@domain.net. You then set up filters in your mail client to move the messages to a specific folder. You let your kids know when they have mail and they read it there or you print off a hard copy. Option 2: My kids are net-savvy but I want to monitor the account. Solution: Create a Gmail account for them that automatically forwards all received messages to your account. You will have to send the occasional test message (making sure that it gets immediately bounced back to you) to ensure that they haven't disabled the feature. One additional suggestion for piece of mind: Get a router that can be programmed with a blacklist. This way if any internet traffic tries to come through with words you know your kids shouldn't be seeing (google bad words list) the browser will simply report a timeout (at least it does on my network). The nice thing about this is that tech-savvy kids can't disable it like they could with software running on their PCs (when I was 16 my Dad put NetNanny on our home PC. I figured out how to disable it in about 2 minutes!) Hope this helps.