parenting baffles me
Aug. 11th, 2012 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.)
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.)
no subject
Date: 2012-08-13 05:40 pm (UTC)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.