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

[sorcyress]

So, the only thing I can remember my mother explicitly saying I could not read was when I first got on the internet and found fanfiction.net and she told me I was not allowed no way never to read anything with more than a G rating --specifically because people are bad at tagging fics or rating appropriately, and she wanted to make absolutely sure I didn't stumble across anything troublesome.

At first I routinely ignored this, but somewhen I was thirteen or fourteen or so, I stumbled across a Mulan fanfic (rated PG13 or R or something) and encountered a fic in which the scribe-dude finds out Mulan is a girl, and blackmails her into fucking to keep him from telling anyone her secret. I only read a chapter, and it was one of the most horrifying¹ reading experiences I'd ever had. I just could not get it out of my head, or make the icky feeling go away.

That being said, my mother is a far more voracious reader than I am, and so she okay'd me to read a *lot* of adult fiction, some of it just as brutal (the gang-rape scene in the middle of Vanyel's trilogy, anyone?), because she knew what was in it and we could talk about it afterwards. I read all of Valdemar when I was between 11 and 14, and I remember mom saying "so, I know the Heralds have a lot of very casual sex, but they live in a different world and in the real world there are diseases and social stigma, do keep that in mind."

(And in the case of Vanyel, I have no memory of what I thought when I hit that rape scene the first time I read them, when I was...oh...twelve. It's one of the only Mercedes Lackey trilogies I didn't reread in high school --it took me until halfway through college to pick it up again, and when I did, I reacted significantly worse. Sometimes there is too young to worry about, and sometimes there is too old.)

In general, I think keeping communication lines open (and being savvy to what's in the books) is a much better solution than taking the books away. Back when I started watching PG-13 and R movies on my own, I was required to come home after and tell mom why they had gotten that rating. I think doing something similar with books --"The Hunger Games is disturbing because people are forced into a position where they have to kill each other for entertainment" is a valuable thing to do with children.

~Sor

1: Nothing beats Chuck Paluhnik's "Guts" for pure awful nightmare fuel. I was stuck on it for weeks at least --just couldn't get it out of my head. I was much too young to read it at the time, and I was already fifteen or sixteen!. I do recommend, but with the warning that apparently people faint every time Chuck reads it aloud, and I am not surprised.