From the author: The material was published on the portal "CHILDREN OF OZ" - Children are addicted creatures. Moreover, they get carried away by characters that we don’t always understand and like, spending an enormous amount of time on them instead of doing something useful - for example, putting letters into syllables and words or completing tasks to develop fine motor skills. This, of course, is a separate topic: what does the child prefer, play or the basics of learning, and why. But my colleague and I were overcome by other questions: what to do with wild children’s hobbies, where they can lead and how to avoid the biggest troubles. The source material was our personal observations and the information barrage of the media in the mode of hype and persecution of the products of Western mass culture. And we almost don’t have another... That is, what fills the main TV channels, the Internet and store shelves mainly comes to us from the West, from Hollywood, from Walt Disney and later animation companies. Not counting the heroes Grigory Oster and Eduard Uspensky. Meanwhile, on the Internet, articles and discussions are pouring in on us like peas condemning monsters and mutants, superheroes and minor villains. Moreover, adults’ fears of the omnipotence of mass culture have already reached the point of complete absurdity. So on one of the parent forums a topic about Luntik recently appeared, it literally sounded like this: “Luntik! Horror!!!". The gist of it was that the little daughter of the author of the topic was selflessly watching a series about Luntik on TV. And mom began to take a closer look. I looked and became more and more worried. And for a long time I couldn’t understand what was bothering me. And suddenly it dawned on her. After all, Luntik fell from the moon, he is without a father and mother, and all the bugs and boogers, his friends, are also on their own, without parents, and Baba Kapa and General Sher, a couple of hornets, don’t even have grandchildren! This means that our children are being prepared for the fact that it is possible to live without parents, to live well and have fun, and this in light of the looming nightmare juvenile justice bill, under which children can be taken away from their parents if they cannot “properly” care for the children. The discussion took place very heatedly, I followed the links and was not too lazy to look in the bins of the Internet to find the juvenile justice bill and read it. The bill is indeed quite murky, but we will still not be talking about it, but about the degree of excitement that is simply instantly formed in a place that has just been empty. After all, Luntik has been shown for many years now, and until now he was considered quite trustworthy on a par with Cheburashka (by the way, also a creature without a family - without a tribe) and other heroes of “our good cartoons.” But here’s another, this time, father’s revelation about that aka Luntika. Let me give you the beginning of the article. Its title is “Why is Luntik dangerous?” “A few days ago, my eldest son (3.5 years old) found a cartoon about Luntik on youtube.com. We watched about a dozen episodes. My wife told me: “Something in this cartoon confuses me.” I found, downloaded, and recorded the first 10 episodes of the first season on disk. And they began to look carefully. They saw. Got it. Dear parents, you don’t need to show your children this cartoon! If you don’t want to raise your beloved child to be a SLAVE, then make sure he doesn’t watch Luntik. I’ll expand on the topic. 1. The very fact that Luntik is “not a mouse, not a frog, but an unknown animal” (c) A.S. Pushkin is alarming. I wouldn’t mind making a cartoon about some, I don’t know, well, hare or something, or maybe , about a butterfly. Why is this alien freak needed? Are the various “Cheburashka-Ninjas” and various Spider-men not enough for us? But no, again another unnatural character. This is harmful, very harmful for the child’s psyche. I will expand on this topic later in a separate post.2. Achtung!!! Luntik teaches children to be kind and good to everyone. But you can’t be good to everyone! You need to understand that good and evil are like two sides of a coin. There is no absolute evil and absolute good. This is all our perception - “this is good, this is bad.” But remember the folkwisdom - “The road to hell lies with good deeds.” And further on http://aboutworld.at.ua/publ/deti/chem_zhe_opasen_luntik/5-1-0-6 And, to be honest, the reasoning is quite logical and understandable. At least, from the point of view of the common sense of an adult. But what do children see in Luntik? And should we be so afraid of what they see there? Will they become slaves and easily abandon their parents? If you let them watch about the moon baby? Shouldn't we remove the TV from the house and strictly password-protect the entrance to the computer so that no infection can leak into the house? And that’s what they do! Or they subject all cultural products intended for children to harsh and, unfortunately, completely homegrown caesura. What then to do with the fact that they go to kindergarten and discuss this Luntik there? And the child comes home and draws the same Luntik, only in his own, somehow understood version, completely inaccessible to his parents. Or he asks for a magazine about him at the kiosk you pass by on your way home from kindergarten. You can, however, take your child in a car, past all sorts of hot spots. Many people do this. It turns out that they have a lot of fears, but they don’t know exactly what to do. Some try to be guided by someone else’s competent blessing, for example, the Orthodox Church (and here there is almost a unanimous “no”) or psychologists. But even psychologists do not reach a consensus in their opinions about which cartoons are good and which are not. Therefore, my colleague and I thought that something was happening not only in mass culture, but also in the minds of adults themselves. And we decided to at least start understand a huge pile of facts and opinions. We set the following tasks: Find out from the children themselves who their favorite characters are, just cute ones or objects to follow. We did this with the help of an assignment at the next drawing lesson: “draw your favorite character - from a book, cartoon, film, computer game or real life, write who he is and where he is from, and why you like him.” Find out from your parents what they know about children's hobbies. We did this using a questionnaire sent to parents by class teachers through children. To study the psychological meaning of the most popular characters and the dependence of individual variations on certain aspects of a child’s life. To study not only the psychological types of danger of selfless children’s hobbies, but also alternatives to sitting at the computer and hanging out in front of the TV. Draw conclusions and create some practical recommendations for raising children based on the processed information. Let’s start with the fact that every adult needs to have his own head on his shoulders, and not rush headlong into the abyss of new superstitions about modern “evil spirits.” It is better to remember that the devil is not as terrible as he is painted. And that he has nothing but pure pleasure, not only from praise, but from generally increased attention and, especially, general excitement and panic. Let us outline the group of subjects. Before the new year, 112 drawings and responses were received from girls and boys in the second, fifth and sixth grades of a regular Tolyatti secondary school. And for these 112 drawings there are only 4 parent questionnaires. There may be several explanations for this discrepancy. And poor children's memory, and low children's responsibility, and weak contact between family and school. And insufficient for parents with children. As we see, there are several links, and any of them may not work. But the children themselves tried. Now let’s make a short introduction from the publication of the results of similar studies from past years in order to understand what changes have occurred in children’s tastes. It was possible to find a dissertation with the results of a survey of 1800 children aged 6-7 years, as a result of which the names of the leaders and rulers of children's minds from 1998-2002 were established. “For girls it was Barbie, Mulan, Glucose, Natalia Oreiro, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Fashionista. The most attractive to boys were Uncle Fedor, Ninja Turtle, Aladdin, Spider-Man, RoboCop, Spetsnaz, Sasha Bely, Fashionista" (http://www.fpo.ru/i/disser/yangirova.doc. Imagesmass culture in the ideas of 6-7 year old children about school. Dissertation author: Gulnara Fanzilovna Yangirova. Year of defense: 2006. Academic degree: Candidate of Psychological Sciences. Specialty: Developmental psychology, acmeology). And now a small study among children in grades 4-5 from 2009, conducted by Olga Knoblokh for the “Children’s Time” program. The full text of the study is here - http://okno.nakaba.ru/2009/09/v-poiskax-idealnogo-geroya-dopolnenie-k-teme-rejting-supergeroev-ot-detskogo-vremeni/, but for our purposes I will only mention the detected rating itself. Unexpectedly for the author of the study, the first place was taken by the x-man Wolverine, with such qualities and accessories as physical strength, immortality and an adamantium skeleton. On the second, the quite expected Spider-Man was discovered - his boyfriend, even though he is a mutant (who is immune from this scourge in our turbulent times?), a dexterous, strong, loyal comrade. On the third they found Iron Man and Ice Man. As you can see, it's all America. Let's move on to our research results, separated from the last one by only two years. It also surprised us. First of all, by its broadest pluralism. These are probably the costs of the socio-cultural phenomenon that has recently been called the post-information era. The essence of the phenomenon is that a barrage of information has already been dumped on our heads, but it still continues to fall with increasing intensity, and children are under the same blow as we are. We learned to live under this avalanche, dig through wormholes and holes in it, and even feel completely free and independent. Some people managed to get away from sin and away from the city in time. But this is already the topic of modern downshifting. And we remained in the city, and our children are children of the dungeon under a barrage of information, perhaps a kind of information disease, from which no one had immunity before, as before - from the plague and smallpox. And our time is the time of creating this kind of immunity, the ability to survive and function effectively in conditions of severe information overload. Let's return to our results. There were a lot of heroes, a total of 64, which is 112 children. That is, there were no strong leading characters, completely obvious in previous years. There were some preferences, we will talk about them. Here I would like to note that this result actually quite correlates with the daily practice of a child psychologist. If 10-15 years ago almost any of the children brought for consultation named Spider-Man or Ninja Turtles, or Sailor Moon with Pokemon as their favorite character, now I hear about many new and newest heroes, so I barely have time to ask about them in the Internet. And a person who works with children, especially teenagers, must know about them. It is a common platform of communication, a great turtle on which to build the world of our relationships. This is not an exaggeration, because children are brought to a psychologist with experience of failures, disappointments, mistrust, and with a heavy burden of incomprehension and alienation. And if you have not even heard of the group Tokyo Wanted or Otto Dix, have no idea about the lyrics and soloists, it will be extremely difficult for you to find any other common ground for communication with a teenager who is already sure that he is not understood and will never be understood . It is also better to communicate with children of primary and secondary school age if you understand what need he seeks to fulfill through a passion for a particular character. Here are several relative leaders in the ranking of children's preferences: In first place is Sponge Bob (Sponge Bob from the American animated series of the same name). Only 7 voices of boys and girls. And Bob himself and his friend Patrick (starfish). Who would have thought? This cartoon is watched by three- and four-year-old children. This is a fun, noisy, adventurous series full of completely carefree fun in the world's oceans. All these coelenterates are not burdened or disfigured by intelligence; they are quite sufficient, just likeKrylov dragonfly, fun time. The children from the sixth grade chose SpongeBob; it looks like there is a leader who is enthusiastic and broadcasts. However, a couple of years ago, in one of the seventh grades of the same school, my colleague and I identified a group of teenagers with a particularly high level of anxiety, and the girl Tanya also had quite clinical signs of prolonged depression. Her only joy in the difficult transition from childhood into the unknown was SpongeBob. Every day she watched a DVD with cartoons about him, and wore a backpack with his picture. And Bob’s cheerful, big-eyed, bright yellow face against the mournful background of Tanya’s black clothes evoked allusions to Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” ​​and his own madness. Tanya’s family was statistically average, that is, quite prosperous, with working (who drove themselves into work) parents and an increasingly lonely child. We “herded” Tanya for several months. Unfortunately, in many cases, parents cannot wait for various reasons, but something needs to be done. In this part, my “accomplice” and senior mentor Natalya Vasilievna, a great master. From time to time she calls such a borderline child or teenager into her office and begins to talk about various topics, trying to catch on to something lively and not painful, for example, to do project work with some kind of statistical research among other students, to help her prepare a school event, what some kind of competition. Many gradually thaw out and begin to talk about the essence of their pain, relieve themselves, and, lo and behold, after a while they look more cheerful. So after a while Tanya became cheerful, having gone through a difficult time with the funny, merry fellow Sponge Bob and the old psychologist. The Winx sorceresses shared first place with Bob. Also seven votes. Winx are Italians, six colorful girls from the school of sorceresses, stylish, spectacular, smart, brave, friendly. They fight evil and have the support of their guys - specialists. They are friends with little sisters from another planet. In general, quite a classic of the magic genre. The most frequently mentioned are Stella, Flora, Muse, Bloom. In second place is Krosh from Smeshariki - 6 votes. His features are cheerful, funny, sporty. Knows how to make friends. His closest friend Hedgehog is immediately mentioned. The series is far from easy to understand, but many episodes are made simply with talent. In some ways, the adventures of Smeshariki are similar to the adventures of Nosov’s little people from Dunno and His Friends; they live on their own, without any parents. Representatives of the older generation are slightly outlined in the images of Sovunya, Kar Karych, Losyash. But they are not parents at all, but simply older comrades. Are these characters dangerous for parents? Need to think. If we carefully read Vladimir Propp, his morphology of fairy tales and a similar study by Gianni Radari, as well as Dmitry Sokolov’s classic fairy tale therapy genre “Fairy Tales and Fairytale Therapy,” we will understand the essence of the Hero who has embarked on the path of heroism. The hero becomes a girl or boy who, for some reason, was left without parental care, for example, orphaned and forced to go into public life. From this moment his feat of growing up begins. There is no danger for parents in this plot and there cannot be. It’s just that everything has its time, and the child begins to prepare for a new role gradually, through plots, first trying them on himself, in order to launch an already known scenario at the right moment. And parents under no circumstances should give in to panic, but improve their psychological and legal literacy. In third place is our dear Cheburashka and the anime manga Naruto. They have 4 supporters each. Naruto is gaining momentum, like everything that comes out of the hands of Japanese masters. Manga is Japanese comics, they are first drawn and then animated - it turns out to be anime. Naruto Uzumaki is a Japanese teenager, a ninja student, who strives to achieve perfection and become Hokage, the head of the village, like his father in his time. Naruto's fate is connected with a secret identity that the teenager himself does not know about. His father, saving the village and sacrificing his own life, imprisons the spirit of the nine-tailed Fox in hisnewborn son Naruto. The father wants people to be able to respect his son for learning to control the spirit of a dangerous beast. But people fear and even hate Naruto, identifying him with the demon within him. It is only years later that Naruto learns the truth about himself. But he has friends and mentors, and he does everything to always remain human. The plot is quite interesting and deserves close acquaintance, because the essence of the central problem of the teenage crisis is not only separation from parents, but, most importantly, mastering the powerful element of the surge of hormones and other biologically active substances (BAS) of puberty. And this outburst is quite a beast and a demon in need of taming and control. In fourth place are Hannah Montana, a singer leading a double life, Kolobok and the brilliant Italian plumber Mario from the computer game. They have 3 votes. During the day, Hannah is an ordinary girl, at night she is an irresistible star with a marvelous voice. This helps to remember the already forgotten Sailor Moon and her team of warrior girls, their lunar prism, which gives strength and complete transformation. Actually, both there and here is the secret of transformation during puberty. A little more, and you can become completely different - much more beautiful, stronger, more interesting. As for Kolobok, the meaning of his quest is so multifaceted that I hesitate to interpret it here in any specific way. I can only mention Mario, I first learned about him from the boys’ drawings, and information from the Internet is extremely scarce. All other characters received 1-2 votes, there are a lot of them. I’ll take a risk and just list it, someone may recognize a familiar hero, and, if we talk about a specific child, what is important to us is not the most popular superheroes, but his personal master of the mind. Here they are: a kitten named Woof, a butterfly, Chili Wiley (a little penguin from Antarctica), and another little penguin - Mumble (from the cartoon "Happy Feet"), a bear "me to you", Kitty, Winnie - Pooh, a good lion cub, a hare and the wolf from “Well, wait a minute!”, Shrek, the horse from “Alyosha Popovich” (she’s funny), Bee (who was born as a human and was raised by bees), actor Maxim Averin, Harry Potter. Leopold the cat, Doodl jump (an astronaut from a computer game jumping from asteroid to asteroid), Jimmy Neutron (a boy prodigy), Vitka Perestukin from “The Land of Unlearned Lessons”, intelligent football player Zineddine Zidane, known for his charity for children, Cipollino, Tarzan, Masyanya, Kevin Jonas (rock singer), Kick Butovsky (great at skating), Alisa Selezneva from “The Secret of the Third Planet”, ballerina Elizabeth from “Swan Lake”, Rapunzel, Selena Gomuz (I think she’s a singer), Puss in Boots, Cars (Lightning McQueen), Ben Ten (Ben Tennyson or Ben 10, a boy who got an Omnetrix bracelet with 10 alien superheroes imprisoned in it and at the same time, enmity with alien invaders, this is reminiscent of the plot of the already forgotten “Guyver”), Fantômas (I don’t understand , like this dusty rarity is again someone's object of worship, he was on horseback during the years of my childhood, somewhere in the seventies), Baba Yaga, transformer, Electro, Batman, Spider-Man, knight of the Teutonic Order, Cinderella, Snow White and the witches Elfie and Nancy, heroes of computer games: Assassions creed (destruction of opponents one after another), Half life (Gordon Freeman, a scientist who became a warrior and learned to survive in any conditions), the worlds of Warcraft - a fantasy quest with battles. Let's take a deep breath and continue: teenage mutant ninja turtles, Phillip Brooks and Jeff Hardy - wrestlers, a robot from the movie "Real Steel", the cat Firestar (from the book "Warrior Cats"). I expected to meet Bakugan, at least Drago, but apparently they are played mostly by boys preschool age. But enough is enough. As for gender analysis, female characters were almost always chosen by girls, male characters by boys. In the “unisex” category were SpongeBob and Kolobok. We also carried out a plot analysis, trying to identify three main groups of characters. The first is kind, soft, protected, carefree (the so-called OUR GOOD CARTOONS), those that are popular with preschool small fry(Kitty, Krosh, Vinnie, Cheburashka, etc.). They received 38 votes. The second group is heroes, heroic path, sacrifices, battles, exploits. Ben 10, Fantômas, transformer, Batman, Spider-Man, Gordon Freeman, etc. Votes – 40. Third group – travel, adventures. Cippolino, Tarzan, Masyana, Alisa Selezneva, Jimmy Neutron... Voices 28. Well, if you are not tormented by the variety and novelty of the characters, the ratio of the plots of War, Peace and Wanderings is quite ordinary. We are a little obsessed with War and Peace; there is not a more reliable source of positive life - interest, surprise and, as a result, the joy of discovery and creation. Now - conclusions. Such a wide pluralism of preferences does not create a reliable basis for mutually interested communication between children and their friendship. And parents complain that their children communicate little and sit at home on their computers. In the old days, we stood in line at the library to read the already well-read The Headless Horseman, or ran to the cinema to see Chingachgook, the Great Serpent. There were impressions about the same thing, and, therefore, there was something for everyone to talk about together. The leading needs of children, according to the plots of the chosen characters, were safety and security, restoration of justice, victory of good over evil, self-affirmation by strength or appearance. The values ​​of search, path, research, knowledge and, especially, creation are expressed to a significantly lesser extent, and they are the most reliable in situations of loss and disappointment. In the folklore on which our ancestors grew up, the values ​​of creation were reflected much more regularly and deeply; their bearers are not always the main heroes, but they are firmly in the rear of the older generation, against which the heroic plot unfolds). In addition, it is necessary to draw a line between folklore stories for girls and boys. If boys have always traveled and fought, and nothing much has changed since then, then with girls it’s a completely different story. Folklore has preserved for us the images of girls and women creators: Tiny Khavroshechka, Marya the Artisan, Vasilisa the Wise, Cinderella (she not only dressed up in golden dresses, but to begin with, she led the whole house), and in modern mass culture girls are all about showing off, dress up and fight with anyone, except Wendy from Peter Pan (she is never mentioned anywhere). The only creator of this whole mass is Cheburashka (“we built, built, and finally built!”) The main danger of characters and plots lies only in incorrect and speculative interpretation, ignoring the understanding of the heroes by the children themselves. Recommendations for parents and educators. They are preliminary and indicative in nature. In fact, we believe that research into the essence of children’s hobbies should be continued, and conclusions and recommendations require the participation of many more heads than the authors of the presented article have. And yet: Parents must remain calm and clear-headed. Do not succumb to any kind of cheap hype, no matter how the latter was provoked. How to replace the basis of children's relationships, if there are no common ones for most popular heroes? At least encourage them to visit each other and not try to jam their daily work schedule to capacity. We know how afraid parents are of free time, during which a child might be stolen while out for a walk, he might be attacked by a pedophile or maniac, or he might go down a bad path with bombers and drug addicts. But the only reliable basis for children's (and then adult friendship) is still common interests and some freedom of imagination and creative imagination. Know that the most stable matrices of development are the earliest, that is, if you told an unborn baby your loved ones and the best fairy tales and sang songs to him, together with him they listened to everything they loved, this is built into his development code. Like all negative experiences. If a baby of the first year of life is in an environment enriched with positive things, it is also absorbed by him like a sponge. The first cartoons about three years old are usually ours, “good” ones, and this is also a strong matrix.