I let my kids watch inappropriate shows, but these are the rules

When I was 12 years old I went on a covert mission to my friend's house, to watch Life of Brian. It was covert because my mother had expressly forbade me to watch this tantalisingly inappropriate film. The issues she had with it were fairly obvious: Bad language, frontal nudity, and most dangerous of all, blasphemy. There were manifold pitfalls for an impressionable young mind.

It might be that my mother's fears were well founded, as since watching the Python team's biblical masterpiece, I have developed an enthusiastic penchant for both bad language and blasphemy, not to mention a love for frontal nudity that endures to this day.

However, surely this must be weighed against the fact that the movie made me laugh my guts up, and gained an appreciation for beautifully executed absurdist satire that proved just as deep and lasting as my disrespect for religion – which I probably would've had anyway.

Now that I'm a father, this is a principle I keep in mind when deciding what my own children can watch: To what extent is the fact that a certain movie or TV show is "unsuitable for children" balanced out by the fact that it's also really awesome?

My son is 11. Some might say that's too young to see Marvel's grown-up superhero jokes-and-blood-fest Deadpool. And those same people would almost certainly say that seven – the age of his two little sisters – is too young. It's possible that the fact that, nevertheless, all three of my kids watched Ryan Reynolds in the greatest role of his career as the titular hideously disfigured-yet-witty mercenary would be seen as evidence of negligent parenting. I get that. Sometimes I kind of worry about it myself.

But I look at it logically. What is the worst that could happen from my kids seeing Deadpool? They start swearing? Well, firstly, my kids know that whatever terrible words they hear in a movie, they don't use those words around us, or their teachers, or their grandparents (in fact, we teach them not to even mention to their grandparents that they've watched this stuff, so if you could all refrain from showing this article to my mum, I'd appreciate it).

Secondly, I used to be a kid. I know that no matter what a parent does, kids swear among themselves, and I see no point in fighting that.

So how else is Deadpool going to scar my kids? Normalising the practice of cutting your own hand off? Triggering a love of seeing people get shot in the face? Sure, those are risks. But let's remember the counterpoint: Deadpool is a really, really cool movie. And if it's bad parenting to let children watch an MA film, I reckon it's even worse parenting to deny them the chance to see something really, really cool.

It's the same with TV. Archer, Family Guy and Little Britain are not shows made for children. But they're shows that children can enjoy, and they're a hell of a lot better than the shows that are made for children. Have you seen the garbage fed to our kids? Doc McStuffins? Good Luck Charlie? There's this one called Ricky, Nicky, Dicky and Dawn that is basically the televisual equivalent of eczema.

I might be warping my kids' minds with sex and violence and jokes about fisting, but better than warping their minds with insipid mediocrity. If they're going to watch the trash served up by Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, I see it as my duty to offer an antidote to that.

And they do watch kids' TV, of course. And kids' movies. We went to see The Secret Life of Pets last week, and it was delightful. Highly recommended. The last movie we went to see as a family was Suicide Squad. This is not highly recommended, but it's only fair the kids got to make their own minds up. They seemed to like it, anyway, and that's another good reason to expose children to these things early on: it's a beautiful thing to see a child revel in the simple joy of Harley Quinn bashing monsters' heads in with a baseball bat before they're old enough to appreciate how terrible the writing is.

Our laissez-faire approach to our kids' viewing habits does have its limits, of course. No horror movies or stuff that may otherwise give them nightmares. And there's always a threshold for sex and violence: we're holding back on showing them Game of Thrones, for example.

But for the most part, we'd prefer to teach our kids about what's good than about what's "appropriate". If this means they hear people saying "f---", or occasionally see a gunshot wound, or a naked body, big deal. They're going to find out about these things eventually: better they learn them from Seth Rogen than on the streets.

And maybe this is something that only a parent can understand, but there's a real sense of pride when you realise that your children are growing up with fantastic taste. The greatest thing we can for our children is to give them the tools to become intelligent, discerning human beings, and when your kids tell you their favourite movie is The Dark Knight, or ask you to put on The Lonely Island, you know you're doing just that. I don't know if I've ever been prouder than when my son asked for the Tina Fey-Amy Poehler movie Sisters on DVD for his 11th birthday.

So whatever doubts I have about my role in corrupting the youth, I'm going to keep on allowing violence, nudity, coarse language and adult themes into my home, and letting the kids experience the great wide world of film and television in all its filthy glory.

Although they haven't seen Life of Brian yet – I should get onto that ASAP.