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

[fadeaccompli]

It worked... surprisingly well for me, actually. I was deeply invested in a kid in being a Smart Kid Who Read Above Her Age Level, and therefore would keep trying to read books that I didn't even like just to prove that I could read them. Including stuff that gave me nightmares. My parents told me that I couldn't read one particular author until a later grade--after a few instances of this with that particular author--and I rather gratefully put that author aside. I couldn't read him, so it was okay that I wasn't reading him. I didn't have to anymore. And then when I came back and read his stuff at the designated grade level, I was okay with it again.

So I can see how forbidding stuff would be a problem? But I can also see how it would work. It's going to depend on the kid and on the situation. Some kids will seek out stuff specifically because they're not allowed to read it. Some will hold off--especially if it's not a Not Ever, but a Not Now--and maybe come at it at a better time. Hard to say without knowing the kids.

[jazzfish]

Huh. That... is not a situation I had ever considered. Interesting!

[fadeaccompli]

I think it's really idiosyncratic. I've seen a lot of people talk about wanting to read books specifically because they were forbidden, but that didn't come up for me. And I think it's partly because my parents so very seldom rendered any books forbidden; it was assumed that if you had access to it, and could read it, it was appropriate enough, and that if we were upset we'd go to our parents for help.

Now, some of that is because the only English books available in that community were ones that had either been vetted by the school (the only place there was a big library in English) or brought in by other missionaries. But even so, I got to read The Door Into Fire with all its cheerful bisexual polyamory, and scar myself with a too-early reading of Animal Farm, and so forth. So when my parents actually said "Don't read this," it was unusual enough that I was willing to listen. And it was always phrased as a "...because you're not ready for it," not as "...because you should never read it ever." Which meant it was just delayed.

I mean. There was one time my parents got a book taken out of the school library, because I brought it home, my dad picked it up, and he was shocked. But that was Heinlein's Friday, and I am actually pretty okay with not having a book that starts with a gang rape and ends with "Yay, happily ever after with my rapist!" in a high school library. And my parents didn't get angry at me for reading it; they just asked if I wanted to talk about anything from it.

...to which the answer was no, because once again I was quietly, privately relieved that someone had removed the book from the possibility of my reading more. But I don't know how many kids took until college to realize it was okay to just not finish books, sometimes. Once I started, I felt obliged to finish, and I was really not liking that book.

Anyway. tl;dr version: "Boy howdy does it vary based on kid and circumstance."

[fadeaccompli]

Oh! And one more note. The author I wasn't allowed to read until junior high?

Ray Bradbury. Who my dad, at least, absolutely adored. But I was getting nightmares from his short stories (my introduction was "All Summer In A Day", which had me upset for two weeks straight), and I really needed a little more emotional fortitude before I could handle a lot of his stuff. I went on to read and enjoy his books a lot more when I came back to them in junior high.

[thanate]

I think this is the direction I'd go in with this also; I was never censored with reading material, although there were a handful of things that various people (both friends & parents) disrecommended for various reasons. ("You should wait until you're older and will get more of the literary references," is the one I particularly remember from my parents-- who at that point had already spoiled me for most of the humor in Gilbert & Sullivan by making it commonplace. But I digress.) The things I would have been happier not having read as a kid were either stuff for school (Animal Farm comes to mind) or not anything anyone else had volunteered an opinion on (mostly things with graphic sexual moments, and that was when I was old enough most people wouldn't have censored me anyhow.)

However... my parents took us to see Indianna Jones & the Temple of Doom when it came out, thinking it was going to be a fun action movie. As far as I know, my little brother didn't have any problem with it, but as a 5th grader I had night-terror style insomnia for the next nine months. I vividly remember being awake until about 4am the night after seeing it because every time I shut my eyes I kept seeing skulls, or that scene with drinking from the wrong grail.

Now, for me that was largely a visual media problem, and I don't think there was any real way that anyone could have predicted my reaction. But if as a parent one is in a situation to predict what's going to traumatize a kid, I think there's at least a slight obligation to try to head them off. The method is going to differ from kid to kid, of course, and I think a lot of times explaining in advance why it's horrible may work better than a ban-- at that point even if they do go ahead and read it they're a little more prepared for what they're getting into. But it depends on the kid, and I agree that there's potentially an element of safety in "My mom says I'm not allowed to read this yet," that isn't there in a more laid back approach.

[fadeaccompli]

Oh, yes. There were also times in purely social situations where I was deeply grateful for "My parents say I can't do that" as an excuse for staying out of something I didn't want to do anyway, and didn't feel comfortable articulating my fear or discomfort around. But I suppose that's a more general parenting issue, of which reading is sort of a subset.