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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.)