How we rate
Every number on a ParentFilter parent guide was entered by a family who watched the film. We do not write these ratings, we do not edit them, and we do not copy them from anywhere else.
Who writes these pages #
The ratings come from families; the pages are prepared and published by the ParentFilter editorial team. The team writes none of the numbers — its job is the arithmetic, the review before anything goes live, and the corrections afterward. No page is written by an AI, and no page is published by a machine.
What families are asked #
Five categories, on a 0–3 scale: language, violence, sex and nudity, frightening scenes, and substance use. Each answer carries a word rather than a bare number — none, mild, moderate, strong — because a parent cannot calibrate a "2".
A family that did not notice a category leaves it blank.
Blank is stored as "no answer", never as "none".
A guessed zero is the single largest source of noise in a system like this, and a false "none" is the failure that loses a family, so the two are kept apart.
How the numbers on a page are calculated #
- One rating per household per film. A family can revise theirs forever; it still counts once.
- Each category's number is the median of the families who answered that category — not of everyone who rated the film.
- The full spread is printed beside every median, because families disagree and hiding that would be the lie.
- When the median is a value nobody actually chose — four families said mild, four said strong — the page says families are split rather than presenting a consensus that does not exist.
- Who counts. A household's answers show to that household at once, and join a film's numbers once the account is at least a day old and has rated at least three films. Answers written past the daily or weekly limit are kept and shown to their author, and never counted.
- How much. Two tiers, nothing else. A household whose account is at least a week old with five or more counted ratings weighs 1; every other counted household weighs a quarter. An account an operator has flagged weighs nothing while it is flagged. No weight for agreeing with anyone: a rule you can state in a sentence is the only kind we use.
- What is excluded is said. When a film's numbers leave anything out — a cooldown, a cap, a flagged account, or a freeze during a burst of unusual activity — this page says so. During a freeze the film's own page says so too, and so do its row in the homepage search, its card on the Rate a film page, its row on a guides list, the rating form, and the page you see after saving. Once we take a page down, families' ratings of that film are shown nowhere.
When a film gets a page #
Two things have to happen, in order.
1. Eligibility. At least one household has rated the film — and the page says plainly how many stand behind it, so one household reads as one household, never as a consensus. Below that there is no page — not a thin page, not a page marked "not enough data". The address simply does not exist. A page that is already up is different: if it later has no household that counts — the one family behind it deletes its account, say — it stays up and says so in its first line, because only a person takes a page down.
2. Approval. A member of the ParentFilter editorial team reviews the film and publishes the page by hand. Nothing reaches the public web automatically. Head counts can be manufactured; the review is what a page actually rests on.
Every publish decision is recorded — who approved the page and when — and a correction reaches the same team that published it.
When we take a page down #
A page can be withdrawn — because a rightsholder asked, because it was wrong in a way that couldn't be fixed, or because it should never have gone up. A withdrawn page says so: its address answers "gone" rather than pretending the page never existed, it is dropped from our sitemap, and the address is never reused for another film. Silent disappearance is its own kind of dishonesty, and we don't do it.
What a page is not #
It is a report of what parents noticed. It is not a rating, not a recommendation, and not a promise about what your family will see. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from the Motion Picture Association or any other ratings organization, and it is not assembled from any other guide site.
Getting something fixed #
Every page carries a "Report an error on this page" link, and there is a corrections page describing what happens next and how fast. Copyright complaints go through the DMCA page. The rules everyone rates under are in the Terms of Service, and what happens to the data is in the Privacy Policy.