What do people do when you have an older kid and a younger kid in the house, and the older kid wants to consume media that messes with the younger kid? That’s the issue at hand in the Star Wars Dilemma. I’m wondering if you’ve had this happen at your house.

My daughter is 6.5 years old. My son is going to be 3 in a few weeks. My daughter was allowed to watch Star Wars: Clone Wars, and then once we determined that she wasn’t scared for life, we let her watch Star Wars Episode 1 and Star Wars Episode 4.

She loved them. She had a great time. She’s totally into Star Wars.

My little guy, who’ll be 3 in a few weeks, watched it all, too. Well, his response was to get violent, to have horrible nightmares, to get really crabby and generally to shift from being our son into being this angry little man.

Whoops.

We stopped Star Wars right away and then pow, he was back to normal. I feel terrible about that. I didn’t realize it was having a very negative impact, but it was clearly connected to his behavior.

I get it. I understand the experiences. But here’s the question:

What do I do for my daughter, who wants to enjoy this content, who is appreciative and reacting well to the content, and who is now feeling shackled by her little brother?

How do you approach this?

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