This summer I spent some time talking to the mother of Joey*, a boy I occasionally babysit. We were discussing Joey’s love of computer-animated dinosaur movies when I decided to casually shift the conversation to Marine Science, as most self-respecting former sophomores would do.

“Has Joey seen Finding Nemo?” I asked.

“No, it was too scary,” Joey’s mom said.

“Oh, right,” I said, recalling the scene with Bruce, the vegetarian shark who decides to break his meatless vows. “That scene with Bruce is pretty scary.”

“Oh, no, we didn’t get that far,” Joey’s mom replied. “We had to turn it off after the first scene. Joey got scared when Nemo’s mom died.”

I thought she was joking, until I laughed for a second and she didn’t laugh with me. My smile turned to an expression of shock. Hadn’t Joey EVER seen a Disney movie before? A parent death is practically a requirement.

Four basic types of children exist in Disney movies: orphans, partial orphans, partial orphans with wicked stepmothers, and kids who become partial or full orphans after a gruesome parent death. Out of about thirty animated Disney movies with school-age main characters, twenty feature some variation on the orphan theme. That’s a two-thirds orphan majority, which is not an accurate reflection of reality — unless the census people consistently underestimate by 1.5 billion orphans.

So, Walt Disney was obsessed with orphans. For generations, parents of young children accepted his obsession, as shown by the establishment and consequent growth of the Disney empire.

“Oh, Simba’s uncle manipulates him into thinking he killed his own father?” parents say when contemplating The Lion King. “That’s pretty sick, but hey, you can’t have everything. Let’s buy it.”

“Oh, a hunter shoots Bambi’s mother in the most traumatic, heart-breaking scene of all time?” they’d say. “Well…at least there’s no sex. Put it on my card.”

Parents who bought these movies weren’t careless – they were thinking ahead. Nobody makes it through life without encountering violence and tragedy somewhere along the way, and these parents understood that. So, they exposed their kids to mild violence and tragedy to teach them that life goes on.

Some of today’s parents continue to teach their children via Disney and his orphan motif. Others, like Joey’s mom, fall into line with a historical parenting trend that may have finally gone too far.

Child-rearing used to be a ruthless sport. In the 1800s, parents whipped their kids and read them tales of unbridled cruelty as told by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Lucky for us, that parenting style died out. Since then, each new generation of parents has been kinder than the last.

But how kind is too kind? Now, even spanking is taboo, and Disney makes movies about live, nuclear families (The Incredibles). Americans have started to mistake overprotection for gentle parenting. We are raising a generation of wimps.

Kids are naturally tough. They survive more knee and elbow injuries than any other age group. They’ll live through the four-minute elephant graveyard scene. But if Dad switches to a Dora the Explorer DVD before Simba even sees the first geyser, the kids might never discover their inherent toughness. They might learn some Spanish, but that’s about it.

By turning off the movie when Joey got scared, Joey’s mom avoided whimpering and nightmares in the short run. She also avoided teaching her son to buck up and cover his eyes. If Joey can’t make it through Finding Nemo, how will he ever make it through high school?

Not to give parenting advice, or anything.

*Name changed to protect my employment opportunities.