As a parent you have moments where, well you just lose your mind.

At first it’s excusable, little children take a lot of time and energy, you are operating on very little sleep, of course you can’t be expected to retain your sanity.

But then the kids get older, they are more self-sufficient and you would think you would have your wits about you again.

Actually no. They lull you into a false sense of security. They look and sound grown up. You stop being so careful with your language around them. They start to understand more adult jokes. You get a little lackadaisical in what you let them read and watch.

And that’s where I got myself into trouble.

The ads for Under the Dome have been popping up on the TV for weeks. It looked interesting, the Princess Child was fascinated by it.

So I decided it would be a good idea to watch it as a family. It looked like a bit of sci-fi. After all wasn’t Spielberg involved? You know ET and all that.

My husband even looks keen, remember this is a man who has had to sit through every Disney Princess movie since 1998.

I’m even able to tempt the hibernating Hippie Child out of her bedroom to rejoin the land of the living for an hour.

So we gather around the television and that’s where things went awry. When a cow is split in half by the descending dome it occurs to me that not only is Spielberg involved but so is Stephen King. And Stephen King writes HORROR. This is the man who turned an amiable St Bernard and an inanimate car  into the subject of terror-filled nightmares.

It’s also at this point that I remember I have a child with a few anxiety issues. Princess Child covers her eyes, mourns the cow, questions why we are watching such a terrible show. I admit that my comment of “steak anyone?” was a little heartless but I really don’t think I deserved the lecture on my parenting ability that my children delivered.

Surprisingly, the child recovered, to the point when a dismembered leg fell from the sky she offered the pragmatic “someone’s lost a leg”. Really, you are hysterical over a cow, but not that upset about a PERSON being blown apart? How on earth am I supposed to judge what is going to freak you out?

We continued on, and really the show was OK, although Princess Child is reserving her judgement “well so far I don’t like it because they are cutting everything in half but maybe it’ll get better”. C’mon Harry Potter had some scary moments, and people seem to be banished in a fireball every five minutes in those reruns of Charmed you watch.

So I’ll probably check in again next week, after all I want to know what happens to the girl who’s been locked up in the fall-out shelter by her knife wielding boyfriend, and find out if the journalist works out why the stranger she has taken into her home was burying her missing husband at the start of the show.

See when you write it like that it probably wasn’t appropriate for a 13-year-old. Although the 16-year-old appears unscathed.

Anyway, I’m off to see if my daughter’s love of bacon can overcome her newly acquired desire to be a vegetarian, otherwise I’m going to be writing posts about 101 meals with tofu and beans. Seriously kid the steak comment was a JOKE!

How do you determine what your teenagers watch? Do you have a standard you set? Or have you gone all free-ranging like I appear to have done?