Right now I’m watching 49 Up which is part of the series Up that began in 1964, filming children at age 7 and then every seven years thereafter.

I love this kind of thing - basically experimenting on children to see how we all grow. And I think I would have loved to be selected for something like this, to see myself grow and change. And yet several of the subjects have said that they don’t like the intrusion into their lives, they wish the filmmaker wouldn’t bring up old painful subjects, and so on. I guess the experience of watching this is very different than the experience of being filmed for it. I do wonder how the children were selected, and at what point they were allowed to give their own consent - probably at age 7 their parents put them in it, but were they told at 14 that they could choose for themselves, or did that not happen until they were 21? Why, if they didn’t like it, have they continued to be in it up to age 49? How many kids were in it originally that have dropped out? Have any of them died? Perhaps I’l learn about this by the end of the movie.