Know what a film teaches before your children watch it. We read every line of a film's script and count the values it shows – kindness, honesty, respect, and their opposites – so you can see at a glance which way it leans.
As parents, we spend years teaching our children the values that matter in our family: be kind, tell the truth, be grateful, forgive. What children are around every day slowly becomes part of them – and that includes what they watch.
Yet we rarely look at screen time the same way. Children watch the same films again and again, and we don't really know what's coming across. Most films have an obvious lesson at the end. But the hour and a half leading up to it can be full of small moments – and those are what children soak up: jealousy, lying, rudeness to parents, mocking, deception, and jokes with a second meaning.
So we count them. WatchbyValues goes through every line of a film and records how often each value and its opposite appears: jealousy against contentment, lying against honesty, hatred against empathy, rudeness against respect, revenge against forgiveness. Every moment counts the same, whoever does it – rudeness is rudeness, even from the hero, and even when it's played for laughs.
You get a simple picture of what a film keeps showing your children, not just how it ends. And because families don't all agree on every value, you choose which ones count – we don't tell you a film is good or bad. We just make sure you know what's in it.
Families don't all agree on every value – some don't mind a bit of showing off, others do. Pride in effort and arrogance start as "Don't mind", so you decide. Choose what you'd like your children to see, what you'd rather they didn't, and what you don't mind. Every film's score changes to match. Your choices stay on this phone.
Tap a film to see the values it shows most, its content warnings and the moments worth checking.
Not necessarily. We don't tell you a film is good or bad – we count what's in it, and show how well that fits the values you've chosen. What you do with that is up to you. As a rough guide:
Open a film to see why it scored the way it did. Some films score low because the villain is cruel and the story shows that's wrong. Others score low because the heroes are rude or vain and it's played for laughs. The second kind usually needs more of a conversation.
Sitting with your child and talking about what's on screen does more good than banning a film or leaving it running in the background. Researchers call this active mediation. Simple questions – "Why did he do that?", "Was that fair?", "What would you have done?" – help children think about what they see instead of just soaking it up. Banning on its own can backfire: the film you won't allow becomes the one they most want to see, and they'll watch it somewhere you can't talk about it.
A few things make it work:
Children won't care much about the scores. What works is being asked what they think, and being taken seriously.
Children copy what they see on screen. In Albert Bandura's well-known experiments, young children who watched a film of an adult hitting a doll went on to copy it. This became social learning theory: children learn behaviour by watching others – most of all from characters they like, and from behaviour that is rewarded or played for laughs.
Unkind behaviour on screen is linked to more of it in real life. Decades of studies find that violent media is linked to more aggressive thoughts and behaviour in children. A three-year study by Sarah Coyne found that teenagers who watched more gossip, exclusion and put-downs on TV later showed more of that behaviour with their own friends.
Good behaviour on screen rubs off too. A review of dozens of studies by Marie-Louise Mares and Emory Woodard found that programmes showing kindness, sharing and tolerance make children kinder, especially young children. A study of Daniel Tiger's Neighbourhood found that preschoolers gained in empathy and recognising emotions – when their parents regularly talked with them about what they watched.
An honest note. Most researchers agree these effects are real but modest, and some argue they have been overstated. A film is one influence among many – family, friends and school matter more – and no single film will change a child. What matters is what they see again and again. That's why we count values across the whole film, and why watching together makes such a difference.
Most film reviews are opinions: someone watches a film and tells you how it felt. We count what's actually in it. We read the whole script – every line, plus the descriptions of sounds and actions – and count each time a value appears: kindness, honesty and gratitude on one side; mocking, lying, vanity and temper on the other.
Words don't always tell the whole story. A line can be sarcastic, a joke can have a second meaning, and some things are shown but never said. So we flag those moments, and a person checks each one by watching that part of the film.
The result is a clear picture of what a film keeps putting in front of your children, not just how it ends.
Early days: each film so far has been scored once, from English subtitles. Wicked is about twice as long as the others, so compare percentages rather than counts. Pride in effort and arrogance were added later: only the moments we were fairly sure of are counted, and some arrogant moments are also counted under vanity / showing off. We never publish the scripts – only what we found.
WatchbyValues isn't for everyone, and that's fine. It's for parents who don't assume every film made for children is good for them. Parents who care about what their children take in along the way, not just whether the ending has a nice lesson – and who would rather know before pressing play.
Which film or show should we score next?
From Handy Little Tools – also try DobyToday (today's jobs, by when), ListbyAisle (shopping lists, by aisle), PackbyBag (packing lists, by bag) and DueAReset (change a habit). v13