Coco and Moana both teach kids the rare-but-important lesson that sometimes parents who love you, but who have been through traumatic things in the past, can make bad decisions for you out of fear.

This is an important distinction from the usual varieties of parents where either they are evil and do bad things to their children, or are good and it turns out that their actions were right all along, even if the child didn’t understand at the time.

Loving parents, families who genuinely care about their kids, can still end up stifling them in an effort to keep them safe. It’s hard to shoulder the responsibility of protecting and guiding another human, and so it’s easy to mess it up from time to time, even when you don’t mean to. Chief Tui didn’t want Moana to drown in the ocean. Mama Imelda didn’t want Miguel to abandon everything else in pursuit of music. 

Their fears came from understandable places. From genuine trauma, and bad things that had happened to them.

But they were also both wrong. If Moana hadn’t sailed off to find Maui and restore things, she would have died on the ‘safe’ island along with everyone else. If Miguel had been forced to give up his music, he would have only continued to resent his family, and would have lost the closeness they had through another, different kind of tragedy.

It was important that they learn where their loved ones were coming from. But in the end, they were right to change things, too.