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We are told to be our brothers’ keepers. More obvious than this is that we should be our childrens’ keepers. One part of this is monitoring their media consumption, and this isn’t limited to newer media like the internet or the video game. My censorship questions are about books (although they have applicability across media platforms).
My Questions:
1a. What is a good book and what is a bad one?
b. How strongly should we steer our children towards good books? How strongly should we discourage (or even forbid) them from reading bad ones?
2. Assuming that clarity is reached on both a & b above, how does a good parent implement her intentions?
Amelia apparently believes that L.L.F. evidences her taste in books
About the second question: On Amazon, I was reading a review of a book that many customers disliked because it is aimed at children yet contains anti-religious, especially anti-Christian themes. One reviewer said that she thought that the criticisms of the book were ridiculous because parents should pre-read every book their child reads and should therefore already know for themselves whether the book in question is or is not appropriate for their children. That comment made me laugh. It is simply not possible for me to preread everything that Amelia reads. There is too much. Clearly some of us have weightier burdens than others where censorship is concerned. Some of our children read a lot more than others.
Because prereading everything is impossible for me, I have to employ other strategies. First, I look for lists of recommended books. The library has a lot of such lists, my friend Rebecca has put her recommended reads for middle grade readers on the internet, as did Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times just last week, and of course the famous Nancy Pearl came out with an entire book of her recommendations, Book Crush, a couple of years ago.
But compiling lists of recommendations is insufficient. I noticed that Nancy Pearl’s ideas of what books are appropriate for young readers is more liberal than mine. Kristof’s New York Times column received more than 2,400 comments and most of these include book recommendations. Many of them are wonderful, but some of the books recommended there were pretty clearly in the bad books category, or at least the bad-books-for-Amelia-to-read-now category which amounts to the same thing for my purpose: finding books for Amelia.
One tool I find helpful in vetting others’ book recommendations is Amazon.com Often their customer reviews are able to a) sell me on a book’s quality or b) convince me that a book isn’t appropriate. Unfortunately, Amazon reviews do not usually establish that a book is appropriate. Of course, there is no certainty that a book is okay at the next censorship gateway either: when I have the book in hand and read the dustjacket and a chapter or two. Ultimately, I think it is safer to err on the side of censoring too little rather than too much. I’m not willing to limit Amelia only to the books I’ve found the time to read, so I have to settle for trying to review many (but not all) of her books. Some of my reviews of her books are cursory; others are more careful.
I believe the most important way in which I prepare my children to continue to explore their world through books is to help them cultivate their own good judgment—to become their own censors. They will be picking out many of their own books. I can’t evaluate every bit of every book. But I can try to teach them that some books are better avoided and some better pursued. This is a gift my own mother gave me—I just can’t figure out exactly how she did it! (I asked her and she had nothing concrete to offer).
So, how do you go about being your child’s reading censor? How do you teach him to self-censor? (Not in the sense of limiting what he himself says or writes, but perhaps limiting what he reads?)
Look for this post to be continued when I discuss the answers to questions 1a and 1b.
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11 Responses to “My Daughter’s Censor”
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In answer to 1a: when speaking of good v. bad, I assume we are speaking of inappropriate, i.e. “Pg-13 or R rated material”? For example, language, sexual content, violence, drug use, etc? When it comes to questions like that, I think you can usually figure out for yourself whether a book will be leaning into the danger zone by doing a two-minute perusal of the book. Read the synopsis, and do a quick flip-through, reading a few passages at random from two or three different spots in the book. You would be surprised how quickly you can discover the overall tone of the book from that quick of a perusal.
In answer to 1b, I think suggesting books is always a great thing to do, provided you know her taste in books. Sharing a love for certain books provides a great basis for parent-child bonding. And while keeping a lookout for inappropriate material is a concern, don’t worry if she wants to read some goofy Babysitters Club book instead of Anne of Green Gables. You have to read some bad books that you don’t like in order to know what you do like. On the other hand, sometime you just want to read something light and meaningless just for fun. Nothing wrong with that.
Question 2 is the hard one. I guess you should just always be aware of what your child is reading. Ask questions about their books. Talk about what they like and don’t like, ask them if they think what they are reading is too difficult or too easy, too adult or too childish. Talk about what the characters do, if the decisions they made or the things they did were right or wrong, admirable or not. After all, that is the whole point of literature, isn’t it? Not only to entertain or to educate, but to teach us about our humanity, to look at other people’s experiences, good or bad, and take something from them that will help improve us a person. Hope that helps a little.( Parley pretty much is interested only in things that involve superheroes or magical powers at the moment, so I’m not sure if that makes me a shining example of how to get your child to read good books.)
I know there are Christian websites that will tell you exactly what’s in a movie, which makes me wonder whether the same exists for books.
I pretty much agree that you’re better off censoring too little than too much so a kid can develop their own discernment, but with the caveat that there’s probably nothing *too* bad within the spectrum of what Amelia’s likely to read. I’m not sure I would want my kids reading some of the stuff I stumbled upon when I was around her age , (I think I was about 11 when I read “Roots,” which has some pretty adult topics,) but I suppose that’s how we develop judgment. I’m not even sure whether or not I regret my precocious reading as a kid.
One time on my sewing forum (where we also talk about lots of things other than sewing) a conservative Christian woman was asking for others’ perspectives about the appropriateness of a book or movie for her 11-year-old daughter. After a few offered their perspectives, an atheist Dutch forum member ranted that she was shocked, shocked that anyone would censor their child’s reading or film-watching at all in any way. I always thought offering that kind of guidance was part of a parent’s job, but apparently that’s a narrow-minded right-wing ethnocentric empiricist religious-zealotry approach to parenting. (Can you tell I thought the woman was out of line and rude? But really, the original poster had only asked about the content of the book/movie, not for someone to tell her whether or not she was a good parent for keeping tabs on her daughter’s reading/watching.)
I imagine my standards for censorship of kid reading would be somewhat more liberal than yours (my daughter is only 2 and so I don’t have these issues yet), and I am the token atheist in your readership apparently, but still, where “literary” books are concerned, I would really encourage you to err on the side of letting her read them (or not encouraging her not to read them). Example, the Philip Pullman Golden Compass trilogy (I wonder if that’s the one you talk about in your post?) – which I consider more on the literary side – yes, Pullman is not a big fan of religion, but the books are not going to brainwash an intelligent young believer into any particular worldview. They are kind of the humanist equivalent of the Chronicles of Narnia, you know C.S. Lewis wrote them as Christian fantasy, but reading them as a kid I wouldn’t have guessed that, and your average atheist parent is not going to forbid their kid to read Narnia for fear of them becoming a Christian.
Dogmatism is boring and I can’t picture a “literary” kids book being dogmatic and at the same time enjoyable. And even if it is dogmatic – say, she’s reading some Ayn Rand style libertarian kids book, for example, or a philosopher arguing against religion – I would think the conflict between what she’s reading and what she gets at church and from her parents could only be mind-opening and could teach her to think for herself. I think even an elementary school kid is not to young to learn to construct philosophical arguments for and against views that differ from her own.
There shouldn’t be too much fear of letting a kid approaching the age of reason encounter a variety of *ideas.* On the other hand, the smutty high school romances with no hormone-drenched teenage characters and redeeming literary value are something I would avoid. So maybe “good” equals literary, and “bad” equals non-literary? Personally, I would find some of the poorly written, artistically mediocre “age-appropriate” stuff a lot more offensive than, say, some smutty Shakespeare. But maybe that’s just me!
(oops, I mean “hormone-drenched teenage characters and NO redeeming literary value”!)
Therese, dear friends never count as tokens regardless of what other categories may be applied to them.
I think teaching kids their own standards by discussing what they’re reading and what you’re reading is the most effective. That builds their own standards and their own confidence in choosing what’s appropriate and worthwhile. Article of Faith 13 was our Mutual theme the year I joined the church and I think of it as a guide. There may be some things you will read that you wouldn’t want your children to read yet because of their developmental stage and you can explain to them that they would enjoy it more or find it more meaningful when they’re older.
One of the best influences I had in my life as far as selecting reading was my 6th grade teacher. He gave us an 8 1/2×11 sheet with ‘thermometers’ (drawn along it in ‘landscape’ mode), each marked with a different genre (on the ‘bulb’ part at the bottom)- humor, biography, poetry, nature, sports, etc. Each thermometer has sections so you colored in one section for each book read. I think there were about 10 thermometers with about 10 sections each, making 100 books read if you completed the whole thing. There are so many wonderful books out there and you can enlarge your world by reading broadly.
[...] My Daughter’s Censor (6) [...]
This is a problem we deal with a lot. Our daughter just turned 11, and she is a parched sponge for anything in print. In the summer, we let her sleep downstairs in our library, and we have on some occasions found to our dismay that she’s found an interesting title and begun to read it. Sometimes it is the obituaries in the Economist which can only help her. Once she told my husband she liked Paul Auster (which is one of his favorite authors). He’s got a real dark side, and Rob was horrified at what she might have read. It turned out that she’d picked up a book he’d edited for NPR of true stories, but it brought this issue to the fore again.
I think in an ideal world I *would* read everything she read before she got into it. But she has more free time and reads just as fast as I do at her level. It isn’t going to happen. In a real world, I should be reading some books I plan to give to her (I did that with a book she got for Easter and decided it should be put away for about five years); I should be reading out loud with her still (my friend does that and I think it helps them to read more challenging stuff on their own — they’re doing Sherlock Holmes right now); and I should be discussing everything else that she reads, be it news, magazines, novels or nonfiction.
My husband did a good job of it a couple of months ago. When NPR started talking about Prop 8 and gay marriage, he turned off the radio and said “ok, let’s talk about this. what is gay marriage? what does it mean to be gay? should gay people be allowed to get married? should churches say they can’t? should governments?” They had a good discussion and I think she learned that we think she is mature and smart enough to tackle tough themes, and that there isn’t anything we won’t talk to her about. We are crossing our fingers, anyway!
I love the parched sponge imagery. That explains my daughter as well.
I appreciate your mention of your daughter reading the family books. It is easy to suppose that questionable media choices always arise from the outside. That certainly isn’t true. My own father is a psychologist. He had a bookshelf filled with old textbooks in our basement. Now, you might not think that a preteen (I’m not exactly sure how old I was, but I think I was surprisingly young) would find college textbooks interesting and so you might think that you wouldn’t have to worry about your child reading them. But anyone who thinks these things is forgetting the parched sponge imagery. And forgetting that advanced reading skills come to some quite young. Library books get finished and then the hunt for new material is on.
Anyway, I did leaf through those textbooks to see if there was any interesting reading to be had there. And there was. Very interesting. But not in the way my mother hoped my reading material would be, I think. Also, I knew how to use a table of contents and an index and there were coming of age subjects I was curious about. Naturally, I read more about them. Reading about sexual deviancy in an abnormal psychology textbook is probably not the best introduction to the more general topic! I remember one day in anger and jest, because I was immature, I I called my little sister a name, the name of a condition that I had read about in the textbook (I’m omitting it here because I don’t want that sort of attention from search engines). I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but I knew you didn’t want the term applied to you! My mother turned white, purple, and green in succession. She was worried. Where on earth had I heard that word, she wanted to know. She was surprised to learn that I had discovered it in her basement.
I’m not sure what the take home message of this story is. It’s not go home and get rid of your textbooks. I’m not going to go downstairs and lock up my Nietzsche. I guess it is that it’s important to keep tabs on what your children are reading as much as possible, because if you don’t know, you might be surprised. Always be talking about what they are reading.
Mary Ann, I also like your NPR example. Talking things out is the answer to so many parenting challenges. Often I just reach over and turn NPR off mid broadcast when they venture into the topics I’m concerned about. (Ostrich puts head in sand.) However, since one’s home isn’t the only place where children are going to hear about those things, this approach probably doesn’t make sense a lot of the time. I don’t want my children to know just that when a certain subject comes up Mom always turns the radio off, I want them to know what I think about these things. And as you said, I don’t want them to think that there are topics that can’t be discussed with Mom. I want to be the first person they ask, not the last.
I also like how you said that your husband starts the conversation with questions. That way you know what the children know already and how they feel about it so that the rest of the conversation can be tailored appropriately.
When Marah was tearing through the Harry Potter books and I was frantically trying (and failing) to keep up we talked a lot about how much Harry lies and about magic and our religious perspective of the supernatural. When she was done with the series I gently encouraged her to move on and read some other good books instead of rereading her favorite volumes again and again. I don’t think there is anything wrong with reading a book that is a *little* dark now and then. I love Ray Bradbury and some of his stuff can be a bit disturbing but I do think it is important to read more moral, uplifting, hopeful, and optimistic books ( AofF 13 was mentioned in a previous comment) When I really get into a book it affects my mood. I remember how I felt reading Wuthering Heights more than I remember the details of the story.
There are several books on our bookshelves that I have told Marah she can read when she is older. She once started to read “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and then “The Illustrated Man” (did I mention I like Ray Bradbury?) so I just told her I thought she would understand those books better when she is a teenager. She will often bring a book to me and ask if I think she is old enough to read it.
I remember reading the Diary of Anne Frank when I was pretty young. Looking back I wish my mom had discussed it with me.
To more clearly give my answer to your questions: I try to steer (by suggestion and having them on our bookshelf) Marah toward older (as in books written in the 60’s or earlier) childrens books because I think they are generally more moral. I don’t tell her she can’t read Nancy Drew, but if she gets in a rut I make sure to suggest other books. If she is reading a book I am unfamiliar with I ask her about it and read some of it. Luckily she seems much more interested in horses than romance or all the wanna be Harry Potter books that are popping up like weeds.