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

[sometimerose.livejournal.com]

Clearly you don't want to say you can't do this in a way that kids will sneak off and do it anyway. But it isn't one or the other because parenting isn't either authoritarian (I said NO) or permissive (you do whatever you like). It can also be I'm telling you that from my experience this is not right for you right now. What can we agree to that makes more sense (read it together, pick an age where we do think it's okay, etc.) and that we are both on board with? Just because she said she didn't want her kid reading something doesn't mean she plans to draw a line in the sand, either.

I expect I will tend toward let's read it together and talk it through for most things, but I am just not as sure as I used to be about the read whatever you like with no filters view.