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

[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.