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

[aamcnamara]

I am with the "tell the kid there might be disturbing stuff in it, let them make the call, talk about it with them afterward/during if they want" camp. My parents and sister sometimes censored my reading as a kid, which confused me majorly. Since I am a super-fast reader, they weren't reading everything before me, so I am pretty sure that more than half the time I was reading other books with the exact same content levels that they, uh, just hadn't noticed. XD But I could never tell them that, obviously, because maybe they'd start censoring my reading effectively and that would suck.

I did self-censor a lot, both in terms of books I wouldn't read and content going over my head in books I did read; and the first book I ever put down unfinished was when I picked up Mists of Avalon in my seventh-grade school library. (Ew, sex!)

...but then, I am the kind of person who is looking forward to my sister's/friends' children so I can corrupt them by giving them awesome books that are quote-unquote too old for them.