parenting baffles me

[jazzfish]

... good thing I don't have to do it.

Elseweb a friend asks, heavily paraphrased, "my preteen kid wants to read Hunger Games. i'm not letting her right now, because she's hypersensitive and it would freak her right the heck out. thoughts?"

Which to me sounds entirely wrong-headed. I was brought up with free rein in my reading material: if I could reach it, I could (try to) read it. The notion of telling a kid "no you can't read that you're not ready for it" is foreign to me. I could see "it's kinda disturbing and might be a little old for you; give it a try and we'll talk about it during/after, and if you're too freaked out it's totally okay to stop." But saying "you can't read that"... does that ever end well?

This is apart from the question of poisonous drek like Twilight, which someone else brings up in comments and to which I have no easy answer.

Thoughts?

(I'm not identifying the friend because I don't want to be That Guy With No Kids Who's Telling Her How To Raise Hers; likewise, I'm not asking her this directly because I don't know how to ask that without either sounding like That Guy Etc or making it her job to educate me on the nuances of parenting that I'm missing.)

Comments

[shanaqui]

I was given the run of my parents' bookshelves and the library. There was stuff there that I wasn't old enough to read, and when I found it, I knew that. Kids self-police extraordinarily well -- if they're not ready for something, they're better than adults think at stepping back and saying, maybe later. It's not a hard and fast rule, sure, but telling a kid they're not old enough to read whatever tends to make them all the more determined to.

My parents even let me read the poisonous crap like Twilight, except that they would then sit me down and help me explain what was wrong with it (without judging me if I enjoyed it, simply guiding me to see the problems).

(Anecdote: my school librarian tried to confiscate my Famous Five books, telling me they weren't suitable. I nodded and said that for the unsuspecting, they could be a problem, because they were misogynistic, racist, biased against the working class, and basically intolerant of anything that was outside the norm when they were written -- not in those words, but you know, I explained that I knew what was wrong with them. That being said, I said, could I please have my books back, because I liked George and I wanted to be a boy too, like her.)

[jazzfish]

The self-policing is mostly my recollection as well, although I read a few things (Lord Foul's Bane immediately comes to mind) before I was anywhere near ready for them. Then again I totally missed most of what was going on in there, so.

*snrk* I presume your librarian was flustered enough that she stopped trying to take the books away at that point?

[shanaqui]

Oh god, I think I did the same with Lord Foul's Bane, but I totally missed most of what was going on, too.

She was flabbergasted for a while, and then told me that I couldn't read the Famous Five books in school or write book reports about them, but she didn't take them off me on that occasion. I think I recall her complaining to my mother, too. Eyeroooooll.