Disney Pixar’s Inside Out is widely regarded as one of the best films the studio has ever made, both in terms of its entertainment and creativity and also for its influence in helping children understand complex and abstract ideas and emotions.
In Inside Out, which had its 5th anniversary last year, we see 11-year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) struggling with major changes taking place in her life after her and her parents move to San Francisco. The film cleverly externalises Riley’s internal feelings by making her emotions their own characters and having them control her as she navigates this change, ultimately pinpointing how sadness is a vital emotion we all must feel to develop and move on.
This makes Inside Out a very useful tool for psychologists and parents alike to help children conceptualise some of the trickier emotions they’re feeling and thoughts they’re having. The importance of having tools like this cannot be understated, especially as 2020 onward into this year has shown us, with the coronavirus outbreak creating a complicated and globally shared traumatic event that children (and adults) could need help to deal with.
Two experts in child psychology — Dr. Oliver Sindall, clinical psychologist, and Dr. Victoria Khromova, child adolescent psychiatrist and parent coach — offered their insight on how popular culture like Inside Out helps children, and indeed adults, deal with complex and heavy subjects like grief and loss.
“Emotions are essentially shortcuts to help us deal with and survive in the world,” said Dr. Khromova. “If we try and eliminate one of them, then we prevent important processes from happening. If we’re not allowed to feel sadness, for example, when something really difficult happens, that’s the kind of thing that can lead to the memories not being filed away properly and remain ‘floating about’ in the brain. This affects how we function in day-to-day life.”
She adds, “I think this is a really important lesson — there is so much pressure in the world to be happy and many kids, just like Riley did, feel the pressure to be happy as their parents are stressed or unwell and they don’t want to upset them. This is especially relevant now with many adults worrying about money and job loss. Understanding that actually feeling those difficult feelings together, sharing them, is what helps the family feel closer and allows them to grow and adapt to a new life can give children that permission to just feel what they feel.”
But to really understand how useful popular culture is in this regard, we first need to look at what grief is and how a child would typically process grief. Children do process grief and loss differently to adults as their brains are, obviously, still rapidly developing. There are also certain periods of time where a child’s brain is more sensitive and where difficult events may have greater effects.
The main difference between a child’s and an adult’s understanding of grief and loss, particularly when it comes to death, is that a child doesn’t have the tools to fully understand what’s happening. There are four aspects of death that children and adults do not view in the same way: irreversibility, inevitability, finality, and causality, with children not really able to fully understand these until they’re between the ages of 6-10. But both Dr. Sindall and Dr. Khromova were clear that a major part of how a child processes and deals with these major subjects is with the support of their parents.
“All of this is affected by the second factor… How the parents are during this difficult time,” said Dr. Khromova. “Children’s ability to process grief and trauma will be impacted by their parents. This is because parents are the ultimate ‘safe space’ for kids, so when things become overwhelming they do need adults to help them feel okay. It’s also because kids are wired to pick up how adults react to difficult things around them so they can suss out how dangerous an environment is. This means that if they have an anxious parent at the side of them dealing with a trauma they are also likely to be anxious about what’s going on.”
Inside Out then becomes a useful tool to help adults and children cope with overwhelming situations, but it certainly isn’t alone in doing so. For example, another excellent film that has similar messages to Inside Out is Song of the Sea, a beautiful animated feature, steeped in Irish folklore that’s about a brother, Ben (David Rawle), and sister, Saoirse (Lucy O’Connell), who lose their mother at a young age and go on an adventure. The climax of the film is Ben saving his sister from a witch who turns people into stone by bottling up their emotions in jars. He recognises that the feelings need to be unleashed and smashes them.
“Children need different ways to process information and for that to make it into long term memory. For many children, films like this provide a visual representation and narrative that they can begin to identify with and make sense of,” said Dr. Sindall. “For example I have mentioned, or even shown clips of films in therapy sessions to give examples of what I’m trying to get across, because that visual medium is more accessible than my words, or it consolidates what we have been working on. A bit like how most adults of a certain generation will say when trying to get someone to understand something, ‘you know a bit like in Friends when….’”
Two other films in particular that deal with grief and loss are Disney Pixar’s Coco and Laika’s Kubo and the Two Strings. These are both films where the protagonist deals with the loss of a family member who then go on to explore and conceptualise how those loved ones live on.
For Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) in Coco, his great-great-grandfather Hector (Gael Garcia Bernal) literally “lives on” through the memories, particularly through memories of music. And in Kubo and the Two Strings, Kubo’s mother and father “live on” through a strand of hair and a bowstring that Kubo (Art Parkinson) combines with a strand of his own hair to restore a magical musical instrument and overcome his enemies. But is this useful?
“Yes definitely, as long as living on is not misinterpreted as temporary death, but a method of keeping their memory alive,” said Dr. Sindall. “It is important to help some young children not confuse this idea with the notion that the deceased may actually return.”
Dr. Khromova adds, “What’s much more interesting about Coco and Kubo and the Two Strings is that they are about seeking answers about the characters’ sense of belonging, identity, and their family through somehow accessing the past and those who have died and hold key answers to those questions. Song of the Sea has some elements of this too.”
“Once those answers are found, the characters are left with a fuller sense of self, integrating those (more positive) stories into their own life narrative, becoming more resilient and believing in themselves. This is definitely something that therapists might do with young people struggling with grief and trauma. Work around their own identity and how it fits with what they know of their family and what that says about them and their ability to thrive and be themselves is often woven into therapy.”
So it’s clear that child-orientated popular culture actually does a lot to help children draw comparisons between the work of fiction they’ve just watched and the various traumas a child might face in real-life, like the loss of a loved one, or adapting life to a worldwide pandemic, or even improving their own sense of identity or self.
“This is going to differ for every child and every family situation.” said Dr. Sindall. “In other words I think it is good that films portray death and offer a normalising experience of it. However, this will be experienced by different children in different ways.”
Dr. Sindall goes on to explain that there are certain issues with the way popular culture handles death, particularly in Disney films, which are a big part of most childhoods, as they often nonchalantly kill off villains. However, he does add there are other benefits:
“However, these aspects of death in the film may serve as discussion points for parents to talk about their own family’s beliefs and morality, or these films may give children something to relate to when they are experiencing a loss. In other words, watching films in which characters die may help children understand real death in a way that is less traumatic and threatening. Children may better learn how to deal with death in terms of grieving and understanding what has happened when someone or something dies. Depictions of death may also serve as springboards for discussion between children and adults about death.”
Aside from the internal things like emotions and feelings, there are even elements of popular culture that help children understand the external world and the major events that take place. Sesame Street, for example, is a show aimed towards young children, but it often takes on cultural and societal subjects like drug addiction, and most recently the Black Lives Matter protests, and coronavirus pandemic in partnership with CNN.
“I personally think, similar to grief, that this is about getting the right balance between teaching and protecting,” said Dr. Sindall. “In other words some people think they are protecting children by not talking about things. But children are observant and sponges for information, and it is naïve to think that kids are not getting bite-size bits of info about these topics from elsewhere. So what films and shows like Sesame Street provide is more information in accessible format. Put simply, anxiety is fear of the unknown, and filling that unknown with worst case scenarios. So giving children age-appropriate info allows them to reduce the unknown and therefore reduce the potential for anxiety and worry.”
Dr. Sindall told me an anecdote about watching Star Wars: A New Hope for the first time with his daughter, and how he was struck that out of everything that happens in the film, she took away Obi Wan Kenobi coming back as a force-ghost, which enabled him to talk to her about death using that. This mirrors the following anecdote Dr. Khomrova told me about her daughter and Inside Out.
“I have to say I am a huge fan of Inside Out and so is my daughter and I have seen it dozens of times. It has been the starting point of so many conversations with my daughter about emotional intelligence. One of the best things about it is it shows how directly emotions can affect our actual behaviour. For many months after we started watching it — if my daughter was getting angry I would interrupt her with ‘is anger in control now?’ — it really helped her connect her feeling to what she did and allowed her to make more of a decision about whether she wanted to proceed or whether she wanted another emotion to ‘take over’.”
The point that they both raise here is an interesting one. Elements of popular culture shouldn’t be used as a primary tool for helping children deal with grief and loss, but as a framework for discussion with an adult who is, perhaps, also struggling with how to approach the subject with their own children. They can be used for children to conceptualise and understand these things themselves and possibly initiate conversation with an adult. Therefore, popular culture elements like the above films and television shows are invaluable in this regard
It’s also important to pin-point how in a world where life can be unexpectedly uprooted like it has been the past two years, that elements of popular culture are definitely useful for children. But we should not lose sight of how they’re also extremely useful for adults to deal with their own grief and anxieties. We were all children once after all, and those things that comforted us then, still comfort us now. But, perhaps more importantly, they create a bridge between parent and child to enable them to approach these things together in a language that is understandable to both. And that’s ultimately the beauty of children’s films like Disney’s Inside Out and Coco, or Laika’s Kubo and the Two Strings, or even Sesame Street. They are not only a form of entertainment that people can enjoy with their children, but they’re also a major tool for how parents and children can approach major subjects like grief and loss together when they might not have necessarily known how to before.
