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 04:26 pm (UTC)I guess I think of reading as requiring a certain level of cognition to get what's going on? And if you're not able to handle the problematic stuff it's much easier for it to just go over your head.
Which doesn't address the 'hypersensitive kid' thing because I've never thought of that as a reason to keep someone away from something. I can see warning the kid: 'this is very intense and may freak you out,' that kind of thing. I expect the kid to be able to make her own judgement call after getting that warning. I also think that the way for a kid to a) learn her tolerances and b) maybe get a little less hypersensitive, is to make those judgement calls, and maybe be wrong sometimes. Maybe that's unfair or cruel of me? I don't know.
Blair above mentioned 'filtering' in the sense of providing a context to the kid when encountering disturbing / grown-up media. My gut feeling (still not tested against any real-world scenarios!) is that that's the best way to go about it. It's complex.