

When they’re young, they’re tomboys who just won’t wear dresses, get into all sorts of trouble and usually are orphaned or without a mother: Lyra in The Golden Compass, Becky “Icebox” in Little Giants, Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and Arya in Game of Thrones. Then, even the “strong” female characters are easily stereotyped. She has a pretty face, is relatively useless when the hero gets into a fight and is a prize to be won at the end of the tale (think: most Disney princesses). Women in popular culture tend to fall into familiar categories. Women can be strong in a nonstereotypical way Here are four lessons tweens can take away from The Hunger Games: Catching Fire:ġ. I can, however, say with some confidence that both the book and film series hold valuable lessons for youngsters - ones that, rather than coming from parents, are perhaps much more digestible coming from a hyperpopular pop-culture franchise represented by Jennifer Lawrence. I’m not a parent (nor do I plan to be anytime soon), so I can’t speak to whether I would take my own 8-year-old to see The Hunger Games. (They are, after all, trying to get tweens into the theater, and they can’t do that without a PG-13 rating.) Others say that the link between violence in films and real violent behavior is shaky, at best, and the films are actually far less violent than the books themselves. Some (on this very site) have argued that no amount of good filmmaking or positive messaging should justify taking an under-13-year-old to films with such a violent premise. The films - both are rated PG-13 - are based on a young-adult fiction series by Suzanne Collins in which a totalitarian regime holds games every year in which children are forced to murder one another.

Follow debate that began with the first Hunger Games film will, undoubtedly, pick up again this week as we await the release of the sequel, Catching Fire.
