What I learnt from Frozen

I drew the short straw, and while the boys went to see Walter Mitty, I was with the littlies in Frozen.
Not nearly as bad as I was expecting, I even managed to learn a few things. It has some great life lessons for little kids to get fed subliminally.

1. 'Fear will be your enemy'. In life, it is usually not what we do that causes us ultimately regret. We sit back, too scared to jump and follow our dreams. Worth remembering that it is always worth trying and failing than never stepping forward. 2014 is my year of taking bigger steps into the unknown and untested.

2. 'The heart is not so easily changed, but the head can be persuaded'. As discussed before, the heart wants what it wants (love is weird, I think I settled on), and there is no logic nor manner in which to alter its desire. Intellectually we can know something, but we can't stop the way we feel - or it's much harder.

3. 'Just me. Just you?' This is a line in the film that really resonated with me. How many times do we hear women (and it usually is women) say 'I'm just a....'. From now on, if you hear 'just a mum', 'just a....' ask the question back "Just a mum?" Demand the speaker explain why it is "just". There is no need for the belittling "just" in what we choose to do. Why do we belittle ourselves? Call the speaker out. Perhaps eventually we can eradicate this bad habit that we perpetuate on our own self worth.

4. 'Don't be so desperate for love that it blinds you' - this is the best lesson in the film for young girls whose heads are filled with the 'someday your prince will come' stories. This one shows that you need to be okay with being by yourself before you can really see others as how they are. There are plenty of adults still in this boat. It would be nice if we could get the wiring right from an early age.

5. There is no perfect princess or prince in this story, we're "All a bit of a fixer upper". No man is perfect, but neither is no woman. We need to take our chosen one warts and all, with no expectation to change them, just as they need to take us as we are.

6. When it all goes south, we need to "Fix this hand in hand". No one needs to battle alone, we can work as a team, whether its husband and wife, sisters or friends. If you see someone struggling, maybe it's a cue to offer to fix it together.

7. There is a scene where the attempt to help is a failure, and the guy gets hurt. He says the experience has "Ruined me for helping people". Yet we help people to help them, not to get thanks. So if you get hurt in the process by anger or ingratitude, it doesn't mean that will be the experience every time. Consider why you help people. What is the end result you are after - surely it's about them not you? With each new person you help, the experience will be different. Cast aside the bad experiences and move forward to a good one. This can be applied to other hurts in life, and thus a lesson in the resilience that is worth remembering to retell the story when kids decided they won't try anymore.

8. One of the things I loved in this film, was that it lists a whole lot of questions you need to know the answers to before considering getting married. It pushes the 'love is not enough, get to know the person first' barrow - a rarity in Princess films. It's done in a fun but specific way. BIG lesson for little girls around the world. The moral being to forgo it at your own peril.
9. On a practical note, I was totally unaware there was a school of thought on whether you stack firewood bark side up or down. A bit of googling has lead me to believe you should stack it bark side up, as the bark helps the rain to run off and thus stays drier, where as bark down will form a bowl and it soaks. Who says you can't learn real life lessons from movies??

10. All in all, I liked Frozen, and I liked that the girls had to get stuff done for themselves. They were ultimately all that they needed, and the men were just a bonus. No sitting around for a true love to fix things. So for that alone, a must see for little girls around the world.

You know what? I am thankful that the movies for young kids are shifting a little, so the Princesses take charge instead of sitting around playing victims. Our daughters may develop better self worth, or maybe they'll just start to burst into song a lot.

With that, I'm tenuously linking up with A Parenting Life for Thankful Thursday.