I’ve written a few times about the sweet spot of childhood. Roughly seven to ten. When they’re old enough to converse and plan and understand things, but still believe in the gentleness of humani… 

Oh, who the hell am I kidding. The second bookend is when they turn into shithead tweenagers.

It’s a few years removed from the Santa Phase. Most people think kids love Santa from the get-go, but most pictures of two-year olds sitting on the old dude’s lap look like Martin Scorsese directing a Stephen King movie. Alexa, show me existential terror.

So the Santa sweet spot really doesn’t hit until four or so. When they’re two and three, they realize after the fact that sitting on old men’s laps begets untold rewards. By the time they hit four, they’re fully vested. And by eight, they’re already skeptical if not outright heretical. My daughter still claimed to believe, at ten, but that’s really only because we’ve all politely entered a don’t ask, don’t tell cone of silence on the subject.

She still expects to get paid for losing teeth, though. Back in my day, that racket ended around tooth number four.

I also don’t think any self-respecting fifth grader in 1985 would even toy with the notion of Santa or the Tooth Fairy or dinosaurs. In fact, I remember that at my elementary school, the sixth graders wrote the “response letters” to the letters the first and second graders had sent “to Santa.”

Whereas today, a school district would be sued just for acknowledging a cultural character known as Santa. Or dinosaurs.

So ironically, while Santa might be lingering longer than he had in the past, the “I won’t watch kid’s things” is happening earlier. 

Unfortunately, my daughter seems to be barreling toward teendom with reckless abandon. Even though I, as a high school teacher, have known what’s coming, I still begrudgingly held on to hope.

Then along came Thunderbolts*.

We weren’t parents who plopped their child in front of shit we like long before the kid could follow what was going on. I tried her on a few Star Wars cartoons, but she didn’t watch the actual movies until she was seven or eight, and so far she’s still only seen the first two. Sure, if I just wanted her to “like” the franchise, I could’ve started her with Ewoks or Jar Jar Binks, but knowing Darth Vader is Luke’s father before watching Star Wars is just wrong on so many levels.

We also might be thrown in jail for not allowing her to watch the Harry Potter movies until after she’s read the books. She’s dallying on Goblet of Fire, so she’s still only seen the first three movies. She damn near fell off the couch while watching an episode of The Middle where Brick mentioned Ron and Hermione as one of the top romantic couples.

But Marvel movies were different.

I’ve read comic books to her since she was damn near in the womb. She knew who Spiderman and Captain America were before she knew who Peppa Pig was.

A funny aside about Peppa Pig. Of all the crap she watched when she was younger, this was the most egregious. I’m sure I opined on it at the time, but holy crap. Teletubbies would’ve been better than Peppa Pig, because at least the Teletubbies don’t really talk. When Bluey first came out, I almost wouldn’t let Daughter watch it because it ticked almost all the same boxes as Peppa Pig: animal families speaking in foreign accents with nine-minute episodes. 

Anyway, Daughter was recently playing with/occupying my niece’s three year old daughter. Said toddler loooooves Peppa Pig, so Daughter watched alongside her.

“Oh my God, Dad,” Daughter says to me on a break. “Do you know how hard it is to sit through a bunch of episodes of Peppa Pig? That show is so stupid.”

Huzzah. I thought “Parents knew what they were talking about all along” didn’t come about till kids got into their thirties.

Unfortunately, that probably means the thing she’ll wait twenties years before reversing course on are Marvel movies.

We painstakingly curated her MCU viewing to line up with her ability to understand and be entertained. After going back and forth a million times, we finally broke the seal by letting her watch Ant-Man. It’s funny, not particularly violent, and the final battle taking place on his daughter’s toy train set would giver her buy in. As an added bonus, we live near San Francisco, so the scenery might speak to her more than New York.

She was meh on it. I don’t remember how old she was, but not old enough to follow the plot. Even the final battle didn’t really whet her whistle, because she hadn’t really tracked on how or why they were fighting . I don’t even think she realized that the giant trains flying at them were the same ones on the train set.

And upon second viewing for myself, I guess the funny stuff revolving around Michael Pena recapping capers in a Drunk History-esque voice over, probably wouldn’t land in a seven year old’s sweet spot. Daughter only identified with Cassie.

But over the next year or so, we dabbled in on some of the others. She liked Thor and the original Avengers movie. She was meh on the Iron Man movies and the first Captain America one. I thought she’d love Guardians of the Galaxy (in fact, I think we tried her on that before Ant-Man) because we have a ton of Rocket and Groot stuff. But she hated it because (again the things I don’t notice when I’m watching as an adult), they start out the movie doing some pretty despicable and violent things. Sure, that’s what makes the redemption arc work, but she didn’t like to see her plushies threatening and beat up people.

This was about the time WandaVision came out, which she loved, so she enjoyed Age of Ultron, and was especially happy that the plot of WandaVision prepared her for the fact that Quicksilver was going to die.

Of course, she mainly only liked the sitcom episodes of WandaVision, not the MCU episodes. Although she begrudgingly became vested in Kat Dennings’s character, who should really be used more.

The one thing I can pinpoint to a year was the first MCU movie she went to the theaters to see, which was the last Spiderman movie. I saw it first and prepped her for Aunt May dying. I thought it would be a good barometer for if she was going to be able to handle Infinity War and Endgame. She did okay with it. Me, not so much. Damn it if that isn’t one of the most painful death scenes in the entirety of the MCU. Marisa Tomei ought to win an Oscar for it. Someone call Jack Palance!

Aunt May’s death was acceptable because by the time she saw that movie in the theater, Daughter knew that the hero’s arc had to have a few low points, in order to heighten the eventual triumph. But she hadn’t seen the last two Avengers yet, so she didn’t know that some movies end with sacrifice. So MJ not remembering Peter probably hit her harder than Aunt May’s death.

But since she hadn’t seen Endgame yet, the second Spiderman was off limits. Sorry, kid, you can’t know how MJ and Peter got together in the first place. You can watch them hint at it in the first movie and forget about it in the third. But the second would tell you that Iron Man is dead, and that’s a no-no.

Even if Iron Man is no longer dead and is now Dr. Doom. Don’t get me started.

So her first MCU movie in the theaters was December, 2021, when she was 7 1/2. Put a pin in that date/age.

Of the movies that have followed that, I think the only other movie I’ve taken her to in the theaters was The Marvels. Partly from parental decisions – don’t really want her seeing her favorite character become an evil zombie in the second Dr. Strange, nor animal torture being a primary storyline of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 – and part of it was the general malaise of Phases IV and V. I’m sure she would’ve been fine with Love and Thunder or Quantumania, but nether seemed destined to drastically improve her appreciation for the genre.

Deadpool & Wolverine might. But if I’m trying to stick to age and maturity appropriateness, I should probably wait another five years. Or look the other way when she watches it at a slumber party, as my generation did with Porkys. 

I thought Thunderbolts* was going to be different. As you can probably tell from its box office: it wasn’t.

It was sold as Marvel’s answer to DC’s Suicide Squad (or was it The Suicide Squad, a separate movie. I honestly don’t know if that’s the one I liked. The one with Starro), featuring a squad of criminals playing heroes, led by a hilarious, mouthy female antihero. I realize Florence Pugh’s Yelena is not in the same stratosphere as Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, but she is still far and away the best new character introduced since maybe Phase II. 

Instead, the movie was more of the drivel we’ve gotten for the past few years. The old knock on Marvel movies was they were just quip, quip, punch. Now they’re intense stare, morose introspection, punch. 

But sure, Robert Downey Jr will fix everything. 

Anyway, when I thought Thunderbolts* would be a toned down version of Suicide Squad, replacing the vulgarities with Marvel’s brand of quips, with Florence Pugh carrying every scene like she did in both Black Widow and Hawkeye, I thought it would be right up Daughter’s alley. Unfortunately, I forgot to calibrate Daughter’s preferred alley up from age ten to age eleven. I forgot that she’s on the cusp of middle school. And middle schoolers, far and wide, are terrible. 

I taught middle school once. Once. As in one year. Right now, my commute is about an hour. I could work closer to where I live if I were willing to teach middle school again. Nope. I’d rather put 3,000 miles a month on my car than deal with those cretins.

The one year I taught, I had finally found a groove, started to establish some rapport, until we came back from spring break. It was a complete shitshow. When I mentioned this to one of the experienced middle school teachers she just shrugged. “Sure. It’s fourth quarter of seventh grade. They’re turning into eighth grade bitches.”

My daughter’s not there, yet. Thankfully. But every time I have to repeat her name three times just to get her to look up from her phone, I know she’s hurtling that direction. Her school district starts middle school in sixth grade. While I think it’s a smart idea, because after six years, she needs a change of scenery and an infusion of new friends, the drawback is an impending three years of middle school hell instead of my own two years’ worth. 

But I sure got a preview when I excitedly asked her if she wanted to go see Thunderbolts*. And no, I didn’t enunciate the asterisk. Maybe that would’ve helped.

Instead, I got a very tepid “Not really.” I tried to up the ante a bit by offering the theater she likes where they serve a full menu. At the age of eight, she would’ve sat through Gandhi to go to the milk shake theater. At eleven, little could sway her.

Her first counter offer was that we leave her home while we go watch a two-hour movie. Might as well shoot for the stars, huh? The most we’ve ever left her alone has been maybe ten minutes while we go get fast food or gas up the car. But she’s already trying on that eternal teenage game of encouraging the parents to leave the house.

(Editor’s note: Obviously, if you’re an official of the State of California, we’ve never left our 11-year old child home alone for ten minutes. And she still rides in a car seat, as (I shit you not) they now want to make law should continue until the child is sixteen fucking years old. I better make it backward facing, just to be safe. Who cares if she’s over five feet tall.)

She continued her one-sided negotiation by requesting we take her to grandma’s. We countered with “We weren’t really asking if you wanted to go. We were telling you we’re going to the movies.”

So mark the end of her “wants to go see Marvel movies in the theater with her loving parents” phase as Thunderbolts*. From late 2021 to early 2025. And that’s likely only because the writers’ strike meant only one movie came out last year. If we measure in terms of actual movies she wanted to see alongside her Marvel-geek of a father, it was a whopping two. Maybe I should’ve taken her to Quantumaniai while she was still in the sweet spot.

And with Thunderbolts* being closer to Eternals than it was Suicide Squad, my chances of dragging her to the Fantastic Four movie are virtually nil. Unless I can get Mr. Fantastic’s time machine.

The one silver lining of this summer’s blockbusters is that she still wanted to see the new Lilo & Stitch.

I better take advantage of it. By the time she’s an eight grade bitch, she’ll want nothing to do with that “baby shit.”

The sweet spot is over. The middle school spot is approaching. 

Whether we’re ready or not.