Last Sunday we took our girls to see Finding Dory at the theater. Our younger daughter Lila, who just turned five, specifically had been requesting to see this movie for weeks. I had a couple fleeting thoughts about whether it might be too emotional for her from the reviews I read, but we decided to take the chance and see how she did.

Now Lila has always gotten easily scared and overwhelmed by certain scenes in movies and TV shows, even cartoons created for little kids. One time we watched a very random Hansel and Gretel cartoon clip on YouTube that I think gave her nightmares. We also had to leave halfway during Inside Out because she was too worried about Joy and Sadness being lost and never making it home. About a year later, she ended up watching the movie with us at home, and even then, we had to keep reassuring her there would be a happy ending.

After that, she somehow successfully made it through Despicable Me 2 and Hotel Transylvania 2, I think mostly because the “scariness” was silly and there weren’t too many overly emotional scenes.

Well, with Finding Dory, she was doing ok for most of the movie until about the last 30 minutes. I won’t go into details, but the part of the movie where it seems like Dory will really never find her parents was a super emotional scene where even I was crying. Lila was sitting in my lap by that time, and I saw her quietly wiping away tears.

“Are you ok, Lila?” I whispered. “Are you crying?”

On a sidenote, on my other side was Lila’s 7-year-old sister HJ, who was snoring loudly because she had fallen asleep during the first five minutes of the movie.

As soon as I asked Lila that question, she broke out in this really loud sob, and started wailing, saying, “I want to go home, Mommy! I want to go home!”

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I kept reassuring her that everything was going to be ok, because well, it’s a Disney movie, and also I didn’t want her to leave before she saw the happy ending, because maybe that would be even more traumatizing!

Eventually she got herself together and we watched the rest of the movie. With its funny, happy, silly ending, she seemed like she had recovered. But I was still a little doubtful and worried that she was a bit scarred from all the “big feelings” she had experienced. So later I tried to talk to her about how it was ok to feel sad sometimes, and that it was ok to cry. And her response was, “Mommy, I wasn’t crying because I was sad. That was a happy cry.”

Oh, ok, Lila, if you say so… It looks like, as usual, my message didn’t really get through loud and clear. I kind of let it go, but it’s been on my mind ever since, because she has also been asking questions like, “Are there bad guys in real life?” And of course, even at her young age she has already seen times where the endings aren’t always happy in real life.

I guess she’s just a big emotions kind of girl (God helps us when we approach the tween years). I don’t have to look too far to see who she inherited that from… even now I can cry during a commercial or from listening to Kelly Clarkson’s “Piece by Piece” one too many times. My husband, on the other hand, I probably most understood after watching how Zachary Quinto as Spock handled his emotions during the Star Trek movie.

If you have any tips for how you handle scary, emotional, overwhelming movies, stories, TV shows, fairy tales, etc. with your little ones, please feel free to share! (I did find this post by Mrs. Pizza really helpful in that regard!)

In some ways, I don’t want to just avoid them, because it’s inevitable that these situations will eventually come up in life. But I also don’t want to scar her for life at the age of five. Also, then we would only be able to watch G-rated movies. Do they even exist these days? She did watch the Peanuts movie without incident, except I think she thought some parts were boring. And HJ also fell asleep. As she did in Despicable Me. I think I’m seeing a pattern here… Not sure why I even keep trying to go to the movies with my kids, but please do let me know your thoughts!