I have been hesitant to write about this because my seemingly cavalier attitude occurred in a particular context where me failing to be a control freak had no real opportunity to go sideways.
This was before the Internet, so I wasn't dealing with YouTube and streaming services and needing to figure out how to gatekeep access to an ocean of who knows what.
But my kids had a sheltered existence even in comparison to many American kids because I moved to Germany as a military wife when my oldest was about eight months old, so he had access to exactly one extremely conservative English-language channel run by the military, plus whatever videos I supplied, until we returned to the US when he was not quite four-and-a-half years old.
Even after coming back to the US, we still had limited access to the most explicit or liberal stuff because we moved to small town Kansas. I would visit my sister in the big city and she had channels I couldn't get even if the budget allowed and the budget didn't really allow and if he had insomnia at her house, he could watch cartoons all night whereas all we had were infomercials in the middle of the night.
I remember this detail because I once ran out of his drink -- Sprite, which contains NO caffeine -- so he guzzled my caffeinated Diet Coke and stayed up all night watching infomercials and then I took him with me to run errands the next day. He was wired and parroting everything he heard during the night to random strangers, like informing the cashier she really NEEDED Jake's Thigh Machine.
I rolled my eyes and told him "You are NEVER having caffeine again."
Anyway, my attitudes towards fostering access to stuff my kids wanted to see instead of worrying about denying them access to stuff I didn't approve were shaped by my mother long before I had kids.
I was the tough, athletic kid at home who climbed trees and played stick ball in the street and my brother was a sensitive soul. When I was nine, he wanted to stay up late and watch Friday night horror movies but they really upset him and he didn't really want to watch them alone.
My parents were both early risers and my mom grew up in a war zone. She didn't really want to stay up late with him and interfere with her sleep schedule to watch a genre designed to upset you.
But most of the old black-and-white, vampire and werewolf movies using chocolate syrup for blood they were airing on Friday night didn't bother me in the slightest. So my teenaged brother got permission for his nine-year-old little sister to stay up well past my normal bedtime so he could cower behind a pillow while I laughed and pointed out why he shouldn't be so afraid.
When my brother was sixteen, his best friend was Korean and they were doing martial arts together and going to see every Bruce Lee flick as soon as it hit theaters. These were typically R rated and my brother required a parent to accompany him.
My mother was born in Germany in the 1930s. She could be incredibly cynical at times and didn't care to watch movies that triggered her.
So mom would drive him and his friend to the theater, buy three tickets, walk in with them and while they were finding seats, she hit the backdoor exit and picked them up when the movie was over.
She cynically said "They just want my money." as her rationalization for why this was fine. I think legally any lawyer could argue she clearly knew what my brother was up to and he obviously had her parental permission.
When my oldest was four or just shy of his fourth birthday, I rented Total Recall. He was looking forward to seeing it and I had Predator and Aliens on tape and I thought it would be fine.
To my surprise, at the first big shooting scene, he got up and pulled the tape out of the machine. He didn't want to see it. So I watched it alone that night after my kids went to sleep.
To be fair, my taped versions of most movies he watched were taped off the military channel, so a lot of swearing and blood was edited out by a channel with 1950s sensibilities, plus I would fast forward through the scenes he didn't want to see because I was already familiar with the movie.
He didn't want to see a chest burster scene in Aliens and would call me when it was coming up so I could skip it for him and he didn't want to see the boring intro of Predator which is full of ugly sex jokes, so I was happy to skip that and not ever have to be asked what that meant.
He was TWO when this policy of "Mom, skip the boring talky stuff and get me to gun fire!" policy regarding the movie Predator began. I had no reason to believe he would be upset by gunfire in Total Recall, a movie starring the exact same guy as the star of Predator.
Years later, he was able to say the first shooting scene in Total Recall occurs in a mall and he had been to malls, whereas Predator occurs in a jungle and he had never been to a jungle. So Total Recall felt personally threatening in a way Predator did not.
Some weeks later, I failed to remove some tape from the VCR quickly enough and a movie I didn't want him to see started right after one of his favorite movies. I think the favorite was a movie he enthusiastically called "Bobby!" or later "Batteries Cluded!" You might know it as Batteries Not Included.
(It took me forever to figure out why he called it Bobby. It's the name of a daft old woman's dead son and she calls random people by it.)
The movie I had been avoiding letting him see was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It's a particularly dark Indiana Jones movie and has themes like child slavery.
But it did start and he did want to see it and he stood in the hallway with his hands over his ears peeking around the corner and occasionally going to the bedroom for a few minutes, but he really wanted to see it and told me he didn't want me to turn it off when I asked him. Since he had recently turned off Total Recall, I felt he was qualified to make this decision himself and I let him watch it.
He was six years old when Jurassic Park hit movie theaters and seven when it became available on videotape. We bought the tape and I and his dad prescreened it before all four of us watched it the next night as a family.
I controlled the remote and periodically paused it to warn him "X is about to happen." And most of the time he rolled his eyes at me like I was WASTING his valuable time, but he very much appreciated it for the scene where the half eaten goat hits the car roof.
I'm not you. My kids are in their thirties and horror movies have grown steadily more awful in the decades I have been alive. Horror movies today are pretty disturbing and so are some things not classified as horror.
I'm not trying to dismiss your valid concerns about protecting your kids and if I had another kid, I would likely intentionally try to arrange a situation similar to what I had in Germany where I had control over what my kids watched and they had no real means to get access to questionable stuff I didn't personally bring into the house.
But I generally tried to support the interests of my kids and help them comfortably access movies they wanted to see while not putting them in a position to be exposed inadvertently to stuff they didn't care to see.
When my oldest was something like seven, he watched Aliens when I was grocery shopping and his father failed to promptly come running so as to fast forward through the chest burster scene. My child likely hid behind the couch hearing it but not looking and he was FURIOUS at his father's failure and probably never forgave daddy.
My kids weren't really having movies "censored" by their "conservative" mother. They were being protected from things they didn't want to see.