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

[jude.livejournal.com]

yeah. I think in your friend's case, what I'd do is have a conversation along the lines of "Look, I don't think it's a good idea for you to read this yet. Here are things I know about your temperament, and here are things I know about what is graphically discussed in the book. If you still REALLY want to read it, okay, but (a) if you get really squicked, remember that you don't have to keep reading, and (b) please don't feel like you have to process everything all by yourself and can't come to me because I'm telling you I don't think it's a good idea for you to read it." With a possible addition of "If you start having nightmares, we are going to revisit this discussion, with an option of my putting your further reading on pause for a year or two."

I think by 10, a kid is old enough that the conversation stops being "I am the parent, so this is how it is" and turns more into "I have more experience than you, so here is information I have that you may want to consider." Especially in a situation like this, where the prospective negative results don't seem to be seriously dangerous (unless the kid is psychologically fragile enough that they would fixate to the point of actual mental damage? but it doesn't sound like that's the case here.)