There is genuinely no such thing as an inappropriate book for a child.
People in the tags who read Clan of the Cave Bear or Flowers in the Attic, but did you fucking die? You are fine like every other kid exposed to Jondalar’s turgid, upright member was fine. These are clearly ideal books for nine year olds because so many very alive and unharmed former nine year olds read the shit out of them and many adults find them boring.
Would you really be such a John Hughes adult kind of hypocrite as to rip the inspiring tale of Ayla, who invented aspirin, knitting and cunnilingus during the last ice age out of an elementary schooler’s hand?
If you don’t want kids to read a book, don’t allow it to portray a child’s actual, relateable anxieties around puberty, sex, adulthood and their parents in the most high gothic way possible. This is like preventing incest by locking your adolescent grandchildren in a small room with no access to non-family members.
-- Mitch Hedberg
I think we need to start being more nuanced with this take because yeah kids could probably read anything at 16-17 years old, but it's if they should.
Like not in a "I don't want my kids to read XYZ book" but in a "Are they actually capable of understanding and processing the material in the book properly."
Teenagers are not mentally adults. They will not be able to comprehend certain things because those are things that come with age, and life experience.
If you are willing to help guide a teenager through adult materials up to and including when to recognize when you should stop reading a book, then feel free to show whatever feel is going to help the child.
If you aren't willing to do this and just chuck a bunch of books at a teenager, then you're just setting them up for failure.
And if anyone has problems I'm an adult fiction writer who's a mom. My books read at 6th-8th grade reading level, because I write in casual, easy to digest language, much like how this post is written.
No. Did I fucking stutter? This is not a nuanced issue and especially in this dangerous political context, people who care about children should absolutely not yield to the opinions of shitty parents such as yourself.
I wasn’t even talking about teens! I was talking about elementary age kids reading sexual content not adolescents encountering new or difficult concepts! Jesus Christ! I think it’s genuinely worse than the moms for liberty style censorship to censor materials simple because an adult has made the call about what they might find easy enough to understand! How is a teenager supposed to gain wisdom and experiences if a bunch adult busy-bodies prevent them from exercising their own judgement about what they want to learn? At what point is someone who’s old enough to drive, have sex and be sentenced to life in prison also allowed to pick their own reading material? How is a person going to be able to understand or absorb ideas if they never get challenging practice?
I am an extremist on this because this is an issue of children’s basic human rights. It’s what American Library Association President Emily Drabinski calls a child’s “right to a private reading life” and“right to their own imagination and the sovereignty of their own minds.” Even your children have that right, despite having been born to a small-minded little tyrant who treats exposure to new ideas like a traumatic event. Yes, just throw books at teenagers! Let them be aware of a world outside their intellectually suffocating home life!
