Humans Mating vs. Animals Mating
Why is it OK for children to watch documentaries about Animals Mating, but not Humans Mating?
At first I laughed at this, but after thinking about it your questions seems to be a serious one for consideration. I believe that it is not okay for humans to watch humans doing it because humans dramatize everything. There was actually a NG doc about sex once and they showed a couple doing it minus the porn sequences.
Mating or sex is totally natural among animals and humans, who are animals. I think it has become taboo due to cultural influences over time. There is certainly evidence that back in Ancient Greek and even Roman times sex was far more public and less private. This includes homosexual sex.
I think it is more a condition of our current society than anything else which makes sex taboo. I also believe that religion has a part to play as some religions have rules which teach people to treat sex in a certain private way.
Plus, inlike a lot of animals, humans do tend to stay loyal to their mating partner for a much longer period of time than most other animals. The ability for humans to develop such strong emotions may contribute to sex being pereived the way it is today.
What an interesting question. It may be that humans mating would insight great curiosity in children to attempt the act on each other. If they see animals mating they may just shrug it off as something animals do.
Well, I may be old fashioned or something but I do not let my 7 years old child to watch any documentaries with animals mating, I know it will happen one day but I don't think he is ready to understand what's going on.
Having said that as someone pointed out, I think is the dramatization of the act itself in humans what causes the parents not to want their kids to see that rather than the act itself.
Mating for re-production is as natural as any think, however the human unlike the animal have inhibitions and as such there are ground rules which govern what is acceptable behavior.
Some animals are selective others are not and much to the good taste humans are similar, the line must be drawn when deviant intent is the order of interest.
The truth of the matter is that like all other fields of knowledge mating and how it is done to the liking of an individual must be acquired (therefor this is one where it can be said, to each his own)
Asadt is correct on many grounds. Animals mate strictly for procreation whereas with humans it involves other interests: pleasure, affection and sadly cases of sadism, profiteering or abuse is also rampant. The other thing is experimentation... Children automatically repeat what they see and this is not something we want them to repeat with others at their age - it is OK for the animals. As LDS_forever said though I will generally not show these kinds of documentaries to my children but then again when you are outside you cannot stop every event like two dogs near the park.
I think one has to study this question a bit. First of all what are we considering children in this question. IF it kids under the age of 10 then yes I can see how we as parents would not want them to see these things.
If we are talking about kids from the age of 10-13 then as parents we may be a little more lax on letting them learn how animals mate and produce off spring as many are learning some of this in school biology classes.
If we are talking about 14-17 year olds then as parents we would want them to know they can ask us anything so we can hopefully guide them correctly so that they are not having sex with their peers.
I know that as parents we will not want them seing or watching shows that depict humans reproducing. We want our child to grow as nice adults so that they make better decisions and become better members of society by not watching things that our society has labeled taboo.