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iQuestions Faculty, Ted Baehr 
 
 
Question: 
 
What does a PG rating mean? 
 
Answer: 
 
PG movies are a confusing category for everybody, including parents 
and children. It’s Parental Guidance required, but it’s not PG-13 for 13 
and up.  
 
These are arbitrary stages. We really know more about children than 
that. 
 
Some PG movies are absolutely terrific. They’re movies that have good 
values, good faith in them. They’re movies that the children can 
emulate the characters, and really learn something valuable about 
themselves from what they’re watching.  
 
There are other PG movies that I’d say are very difficult. They contain 
bathroom humor. They contain children making fun of each other. 
They contain things that children pick up on, sort of the bigotry and 
the bad values that you don’t want the children to pick up on—such as 
Ant Bully and others. 
 
So you’ve got to be very careful, and understand what’s good and 
what’s bad at that stage of development.  
 
That means that for the next stage, let’s say 13 and up, it might be 
perfectly acceptable for them. They’ve now grown beyond that stage 
of peer-pressure and feeling like they want to be one of the crowd.  
 
 
 
But you’ve got to watch out. All children are a little different as they 
move through these stages of development. They have different ways 
of looking at the world, and they pick up on scripts that often parents 
don’t pick up on.  
 
Often they pick up on things in the movie that are telling them they 
should be discriminatory, that they should be bigoted, that they should 
be cruel, that they should be this or that—things that their parents 
don’t want them to be.  
 
Now, I’m just taking the negative. 
 
Some movies teach very good values that are PG or G rated, such as 
Finding Nemo. It’s about a father loving his son so much that he’s 
willing to do anything to help his son. 
 
Game Plan is about a father that is very egotistical. “The Rock” finds 
out that he has a daughter, and he learns to love his daughter and get 
over his own selfishness.  
 
These are great values.  
 
There are other movies which seem to move in exactly the wrong 
direction, and they seem to alienate children from their parents. Ant 
Bully is one of them. 
 
I don’t want to be too mean on them, because when you get to an 
older stage of development they could be teaching other values. You 
just need to be careful about it.  
 
We try so hard to provide you information that helps you to be the 
judge, not based on what somebody else has judged or maybe 
working at a studio and too busy to understand children. We want you 
to have the tools to make a difference.  
Baehr -2- 
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