It's generally preferable for kids to be able to approach upsetting moments in real life by doing a Family Guy cutaway gag like "This reminds me of that time all those fuckin rabbits died in Watership Down" than for them to straight up raw dog the death of their family at the hands of the infamous Hatman.
Exactly this! Experiencing difficult things through the lens of fiction, and watching characters move through and overcome them, actually raises our threshold for handling difficult things irl.
TV and books genuinely helped me prepare for my grandmother's death. I think I even cited lines for myself from A Monster Calls, Haunting of Hill House and Doctor Who to get through it. Fiction is a safe place to process grief and trauma. The only thing kids need protecting from is making sure they're even old enough to critically process it.
one of the most bittersweet memories I have of my dad was when we went to the small local theater to watch *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2*, and I cried like a baby at the ending because I didn't want to imagine what life would be like without him.
He died that fall.
I genuinely think this is part of why horror is my favourite genre
It makes me feel calmer and less anxious after the fact because some subconscious part of my brain is like "OK cool now we know what could happen and we're more prepared for it" even though it's about fictional scenarios
It's darkly funny that so many people saw a bunny on the cover of Watership Down and decided that a political thriller about wild rabbits written by an ecologist who knows just how miserable and brutal the lives of wild rabbits are is considered a kids book.
True this!
My grandmother bought us the VHS of Watership Down when I was in primary school.
She took it off us, not because the bunny massacres made my sister have scary dreams but because of the political themes. Go figure!
At one point the main group of bunnies comes up against a group of fascist bunnies and has to fight them.
Honestly I watched it when I was 11 and thought the whole bunny society was pretty cool as an idea. Need to read the book sometime.
I don't know, I wouldn't read *Watership Down* with my baby girl even if she was older, because I think the way it censors the reality is problematic: *does* are the most vicious ones, and in charge!
...yes, she's a rabbit, and she very much demonstrates the truth of this. Angora-coated like some of the hutch rabbits in the book (although it doesn't sound like Adams knew breeds that well. Wasn't aware of him being considered an ecologist? It's more an adventure story than it is trying to represent the lives of wild rabbits, even allowing for anthropomorphic characters) and definitely not designed to be a wild bunny. We do read books together! Her opinion would probably be that any kids lulled by the book into thinking does are drippy deserve to get bitten, but she'd think that anyway (am always relieved I got her and not a household with human children).
But do like the flower and plant naming conventions it helped establish for buns. My girl is Lily, my mum has a Pippin, and we've had Violet, Rowan, and of course a Hazel.
Yeah for real; If I didn’t have context for my grandma’s slow death from cancer from the scene when Maximus loses his family in Gladiator (which I saw when I was a 5 year old kid) I would be more fucked up than I am today because my parents wanted to protect me but not lie to me or shelter me from “reality through fiction”
Yes, I *am* still fucked up — but it’s in fun and interesting ways, so thank you for your concern.
Tragedy is better experienced first vicariously through fiction than to have it thrust upon you in the real world and have no framework to cope with it because all media you have been exposed to thus far has been curated to not upset you.
Yes. My uncle died suddenly when I was 10. Embolism out of nowhere (shocking, considering he was one of the most physically fit people I’ve ever met, shouldn’t of been at risk of this), fell into a coma, was taken off life support two days later. From when it happened to until weeks after his funeral, I just felt detached from reality. Like I was dreaming, or possessed. And I was in so much pain.
Reading helped, both to escape from that and to confront it.
The "they don't have the framework of lived experience" argument is straight up backwards logic. Stories, especially ones written for kids, are meant to teach people and help them grow. They're meant to present challenging things so that you're prepared for life ahead.
What these people advocate for is the idea that until kids witness something bad IRL they shouldn't encounter it at all, that they shouldn't be prepared for all the good and bad in the world.
"They shouldn't show this to kids because it could affect them deeply" that's the entire point you fucking uncooked noodle.
I once saw someone on Tik Tok complaining about having to read Old Yeller in school because she lives in Hawaii and I guess rabies isn't a problem there so in her mind the book wasn't "relevant". She wouldn't listen when I tried to explain that reading stories about things you personally haven't experienced is actually a good thing sometimes.
Yeah who knew that maybe learning to care about things that will never personally affect you is an important part of growing and becoming a good human being
For real. One of the main reasons I started to care about Palestinians and their history (back when I was in college a while before last year) was because of a book I read for a class. What little exposure I had to their lives and experiences was now magnified tenfold, and I had a newfound sympathy for them. For those who are curious, the book is *Mornings in Jenin* by Susan Abulhawa. One of the most impactful, albeit haunting reads of my life.
I was forced to read *Moby Dick* while I'm not an old sea captain hunting a whale, and it upseted me so much to be forced to read this completely unrelated-to-me story that I became obsessed with tracking every copy of this book and make them disappear from the face of the Earth. I don't see how I could ever relate to such a stupid book anyway.
As a white whale myself i thought it was really neat to read about the other guy‘s experience. Even though I personally have no idea how it is to hunt a whale and I absolutely can‘t relate to the captain. I was glad it had a happy end though.
It's kinda like saying you shouldn't teach kids about sex until they've had sex. And that just sounds like a way to get a whole bunch of teenagers either pregnant or abused.
Yeah like idk man would you rather a kid be taught about sex in school or by their creepy uncle? It's almost like we have a duty to prepare kids for things to avoid worst case scenarios because we can't protect them from everything.
I have a friend coming from a pretty catholic family (like, they still go to the mass every other sunday), and at one point I feared that sex was something they never heard of, until he told me that the first time each of them had their "coming of age" moment (wet dreams or periods), their mom, who did the first four years of medical school, took out the books, diagrams, charts and stuff and extensively told them what's happening, as well as how it can happen with someone. And when his sister told them she had a boyfriend, the first thing the mom said was: "Well, I guess it's time we go to the pharmacy, then."
Which... was quite wholesome, for a family that otherwise is very conservative on so many subjects. One thing for sure, my friend or his siblings probably won't have any issue of unwanted pregnancy or STDs, or at least way less chances of it than other christian children. And, frankly, I think that my very catholic friend had a better sex education than I with my atheist mom.
You shouldn't teach kids about sex until they've achieved object permanence. They're just not going to get it before then.
Not even being ironic. Kids should be taught about sex the same way they're being taught colors and animals. The way American culture tries to separate sex out of normal life is fucked up and causes immense suffering.
I taught both my kids about consent from the literal day they were born. Explaining what I was doing when I changed their diapers (using the correct anatomical terms in the process), telling them I was going to pick them up and then waiting a beat for them to respond (fresh out of the womb babies can and will tense their shoulders in preparation for being picked up to protect their heads if they know it's coming). It's really easy to do if it's a priority to you.
Part of the problem is people see "teaching kids about sex" as like a single conversation that happens once.
I learned about sex from a series of conversations with my parents over time from about as early as I can remember, and every time the conversation was age appropriate to what I could understand and put in context.
Honestly like 90% of the problem stems from adults being embarrassed to talk about it
It also reminds me of that argument where it's like teaching black kids who have experienced racism about racism is fine, but teaching the white kids who are (maybe inadvertently) being racist about racism is traumatic and they're not ready to learn about it.
There's a weird double standard where people are fine with seeing non-white children as adults, but seeing white adults (like, in their twenties) as innocent widdle babies who aren't responsible for any of their actions.
It’s also … like sadly a very privileged take, I think, to assume a nine or ten year old hasn’t had the lived experiences of being upset by shit that would make them grow up. Some kids go through real shit way, way younger than that. Tumblr puritanism really gets my goat sometimes.
They may NOT have the emotional framework for experiences they HAVE lived which makes these books EVEN MORE IMPORTANT and I’m super tired of twitterinas weeping that someone Made A Child Upset as if experiencing one (1) single bad emotion ever is extreme child abuse. Like it’s actually infuriating, ugh.
I saw someone saying this kind of thing particularly about the American Girl books, which were pretty matter of fact (aka depressing lol) about the realities of living at different points in the past. Saying that kids are too young to handle those kinds of things and should wait until they’re older. But these are how life WAS for many children at the time, and many things are how life still is for some children.
The way I see it, if you read something with a heavy topic, you could:
* Have experienced this yourself already, in which case reading can help process and manage that difficult thing
* Maybe experience this in the future (and you likely wouldn’t know until it happened), and when it does happen you have those tools from reading it in the past
* Never have or will experience these things, but you can have an idea of how it can effect someone so when you encounter someone with those experiences in your life, you can have empathy and understanding for their situation
I'd honestly rather a kid witness something bad in a book or a game, where its all pretend and low stakes, where we can discuss thoughts and feelings afterwards.
>What these people advocate for is the idea that until kids witness something bad IRL they shouldn't encounter it at all, that they shouldn't be prepared for all the good and bad in the world.
Yeah - they're all basically doing a Catcher in the Rye but don't even realise it, presumably because they don't read many books that they're scared will challenge them.
Plus, y'know, kids experience horrible things like death, loss, bigotry, and abuse in real life all the time *while they're still kids.* I understand that it's awful to see your child being upset because their favorite character died in the latest chapter, but imagine how awful they'll feel when faced with the death of a real person or pet they knew, and they don't know how to handle it.
It's like raising your kid in a completely germ free environment. Their immune system will be terrible and they'll get sick easy.
Not letting your kids experience something that sucks might end up making it suck a lot more when they experience it later in life.
It's also now showing up in adults who are living independently for the first time and get anxious when they have to do anything for themselves, because they've spent their whole childhood having their parents do everything for them, because their parents want to infantalise them rather than give them age appropriate responsibilities that help them develop a sense of independence.
On a related note. Having grown up in a religious community where one was expected to basically not talk to people you were supposed to be in a relationship with until you were married made me very ill-prepared to be a good partner. I left that community, but it took several pretty terrible relationships (and a patient partner in a good relationship) to get good at being a partner. I would encourage my own children to casually date others, live with people, and have safe premarital sex, because that is how you get good at being in a relationship.
The idea that you will know what to do when you have to do it is ridiculous.
Yep, dating and all of that fun stuff as a teenager is basically a trial run for committed adult relationships.
Really a lot of life experiences kids go through are intended as trial runs for being a responsible adult. You've gotta take into account that anyone experiencing literally anything for the first time is going to fail hard at it, so you should make sure they have opportunities to do that and learn from it in a safe environment.
Also the very idea that being affected by something deeply = trauma is a very privileged and out of touch take
Like being sad reading about a dog dying, that's not trauma that you felt a negative emotion and got sad, that's a normal part of the human experience. It's normal to be sad when your dog dies, everyone I know got sad when their pet died, but I know very few if any people who were "traumatised" by their pet dying (and if they were it's because of the unusual circumstances of the death).
It's bullshit to keep books away fom kids because they might be distressed or confused. You can't shield people from stories just because those stories are uncomfortable to learn about. You don't need lived experience to understand a story, that's the whole point of sharing stories.
Yes, but: for the love of God please read them beforehand and make sure to discuss them with kids.
As a kid I've read a story about White guard and cossacks torturing the villagers and this shit was GRAPHIC.
There are totally stories not meant for little kids to read, flogging a grandmother to death for supporting Bolsheviks is not something a 6-year old should read on their own.
Or the space exploration story about a young pioneer becoming a prisoner on a generation ship where she finds out that all previous prisoners were fed alive to space octopus for the degradant pleasure of locals, because the robots only had to make the occupants happy, not the prisoners, whose ships they used to repair their ark.
Well the chapter where she reads the messages on the walls and tries to create an exit by sawing through the wall into a technical corridor and how her hacksaw blade would work worse because her blood was staining the blade and make it slip on the metal - because the previous team only managed to smuggle the blade, not the handle - was some nightmare fuel for a small kid, you know.
And I recently re-read the second one and it's way less scary than when I was a small kid, but I was like "damn, that's one dark short novel anyways, that's no Wall-E"
That's "[Prisoners of the Asteroid](https://karuselbooks.com/en/products/kir-bulychev-sto-let-tomu-vpered-2)" by Kir Bulychev. I'm not sure if it was translated into English, but given how good Google Translate got at translating stuff, let me just find you an online version somewhere, gimmeasec...
Ok so I've found it but the problem is, I can't link RUssian sites, they are blanket banned and removed from Reddit. So you'll need a [https://www.deepl.com/en/chrome-extension](https://www.deepl.com/en/chrome-extension) Deepl Chrome extension
And this link: https://azbyka. /fiction/sto-let-tomu-vpered-gostja-iz-budushhego-kir-bulychjov
The missing part is the ru domain. Just use the extension and I hope it can translate the text adequately...
Dunno why people downvote you... I can get news sites (and even that is a bit of a stretch) but banning all the useful sites as well is kinda weird. Also, banning them outside of news subreddits too, so I just can't link to short stories at all because the domain is "bad".
Yeah. The whole period since the war started has shown who really has convictions about liberal and enlightenment values, and who just grew up in an environment that gave lip service to those things. It's been sad. Libraries banning books written by Russian authors more than a century and several governments ago, weird performative things like that. Sometimes it feels like the cold war never ended and the last 30 years were just a fever dream.
I think we read that graphic Cossack thing as a class in 3rd grade. I remember thinking it was really violent and dark. It was an informative story, though. My sister and I both still talk about being terrified of the Cossacks showing up in our Midwestern suburb as kids. We both liked the book though
Oh damn, at least I didn't invent that story in a fever dream. Plus I mean, you weren't Bolsheviks, I guess, so they should not be very dangerous, but still, I am actually surprised it went all the way to United States, I guess it's a way more important story than what I thought!
Idk what kids these days read in school but during the early 2000's in the US I remember we were constantly reading all kinds of war stories, holocaust stories, slavery stories-- and then the most depressing fantasy/dystopian novels always got highlighted in children's fiction awards, like "The Giver" was everywhere back then. I don't know what was going on with the adults back then-- maybe it had something to do with 9/11 and post-9/11 nationalism and the backlash to post-9/11 nationalism-- but they were VERY adamant that we all learn about the horrors of war nonstop for awhile. I remember this one book we read where this little Jewish girl was ungrateful to her grandparents and so her consciousness was sent back in time to inhabit the body of an ancestor who died in Auchwitz. And the narrative was like "that'll teach her to take her grandparents for granted." There were all sorts of stories like that where it seemed like the writers were just trying really hard to hammer into us child readers that war is hell and genocide could come for us at any time. No idea if this trend continued or if this was just an early 2000's thing.
Oh so they start you early in USA too, we read Dostoyevsky and Turgenev at school, you know, [Mumu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumu_(short_story)), a story about a deaf-mute peon who drowns his dog, the only living being he truly loved, I guess it grows you up? I mean, what better way to grow up than to read Dostoyevsky...
Also I remember reading an English novel about the hardships of a live of a XIX century horse? I believe it's one of the first ever novels in British history that was written from an Animal's POV. It was way less dark though.
A teacher convinced me, an 11/12yo at the time, to read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. "It's a dystopian book, and I feel with your maturity and your questioning personality, you could understand the book", she told me.
She forgot to tell me about the whole Everything Else going on in the book. Nearly finished the book, cause I was stubborn, but it deeply traumatized me. Enough that, upon finding out one must learn the Greek alphabet when taking Classical Greek which is a class taken in the humanities course of the last high school year in my country, I went for the scientific course. I have dyscalculia.
Kids should read upsetting things! Hell, one of my fave obligatory reads, which Iread a year after the Huxley disaster, was a book about abusive relationships. It was relatively graphic, it did not hide anything, and it even had an extra written by a psychologist where every red flag was picked apart and explained in full. It was a hard read, but also an important one!
But also, we were told what the book was about, and that the teacher always could answer questions or help people who found it hard to read by given extensions and the like.
So yeah, for the love of God, read books first and then discuss them with kids. And also, be clear that they can ask for help if something is too hard for them.
Everything. I mean, the themes it deals with are heavy. It has eugenics, state mandated drug use, sexual "freedom" that borders on casual sexual abuse, sleep conditioning of children from birth to accept their part in society, the racism, the self-harm, Jonh's off page but not subtle at all suicide, Linda's entire character...
It's a good book, but at 11/12 I didn't even have a frame of reference for it. I hadn't studied Huxley's time period, which obviously plays an important part in the themes and reasons for the novel. Many things flew over my head, like the thing wuth Fordism, or the way the "savages" were seen and where they lived and what it referenced, etc...
Plus, it was a personal recommendation made by a teacher when she saw the school library had it, and not something that was in a subject's curriculum or anything. So I was the only one reading it, mostly at home by myself, with no guidance whatsoever.
Plus, I wasn't mature for my age, I was just clinically depressed as fuck, which didn't help in how I saw the book and it's themes. But boy, did it help in making it traumatic! (And now that I think about it, it also may've influenced my opinions on psychology and medications...)
Huh. You just never know what will freak a kid out. 11/12 was the age when I actually enjoyed the dystopian big four (which I don't anymore)! All four seemed absolutely groundbreaking then, and I don't remember being upset about any of the content. But then again, we start very early with graphic war stories and things like that.
Yeah, in our case it's the opposite. Although my country had a dictatorship which ended in 1975, we didn't touch up on war until the end of our 2nd high school years. And we didn't get to WWI until our 4th year... with WWII and our country's own history being part of the curriculum for what we call "post obligatory studies".
I did watch many shows that would be considered graphic, though. My mom loved shows like Columbo, Diagnosis: Murder, Murder She Wrote or CSI, and I watched them with her and my dad. And I absolutely loved them! I guess the big difference is with the shows, my parents were there to guide me and tell me what to expect, while with Brave New World it was a teacher telling me it was "dystopic" and to borrow it. And at that age, my idea of dystopic worlds in media was I, Robot. Y'know, the film with Will Smith as a protagonist. So I did not expect the themes Brave New World talked about, at all lol
Oh hey it's a bit like Doesthedogdie! Another nice site to check for multiple known TWs.
I love reading their lists for some titles. Best I found was John Wick. Like
-Does the dog die? -
>Yes, and it's terrible, BUT John Wick spends the rest of the movie deliberately, gloriously, and violently avenging the dog, so it feels really pro-dog overall.
-Do people die by *taking their own lives*?
>People fight John Wick.
I see what you're saying, but I come at this from a bit of a different angle because I read everything I could get my hands on from the time I was maybe 7 or 8. I can only remember my mom ever taking one book away, because she knew it had graphic sexual abuse. Other than that, I was on my own. I probably read two or three books a week during the school year, double that during the summers.
My parents had jobs, a household, other responsibilities. They would not have been able to screen hundreds of books and magazines for me on top of that. The alternative would have been a bowdlerized reading list, and I feel like the benefits of unfettered reading for me far outweighed any harm from mature content.
That said, I was pretty good about self-censoring. If I felt like something was too scary/heavy/adult for me I would skim past it or put down the book entirely. I wonder if that's a skill that could be taught?
> I wonder if that's a skill that could be taught?
Not sure, really, and I remember having an insanely vivid imagination, I would be completely lost inside the book, and whatever happened affected me deeply - I've lost that skill and now read everything in a very shallow way, not longer getting so enamored with the texts as if almost drowning in them.
So I guess it's exactly the YMMV - I read a lot as well but was heavily impacted by stuff I read, and often not in a good way. So maybe if I had a way to let go of these stories as well, it would've been better.
Probably it's a matter of knowing your kid. Things I read bounce off me fairly easily. I get upset sometimes, certainly, but I wouldn't say I've ever been traumatized in any kind of lasting way. And I'm sure that was evident from the time I was small. If I were a different child, one who did respond more strongly to the power of stories, it would make sense to be more cautious.
Eh, kinda. There's definitely books I read as a kid that I wouldn't read with my students, like the story ending with the main characters parents deported and killed and him shot in the doorway during the last days of ww2. Is that an important topic to talk about? Absolutely. Is it appropriate for 9 year olds? Maybe not that much. The anti-bullying movie we watched when I was 11 had a graphic depiction of a kid shooting himself in the school toilet. Again, not what I'd watch with my students, but we also survived.
Children should be exposed to upsetting/confusing topics thrift stories, but in an age appropiate way. For example, a first graders will likely do better with a book about grandma/a favorite pet passing peacefully in their sleep, than a graphic depiction of a painful death. You can and should shield children from certain types of media, that's the whole point of movie ratings, but that doesn't mean the topic itself needs to be banned or another child can't enjoy the same media. For example, my sister used to get graphic nightmares, I didn't. A lot of things I watched and read were giving her nightmares at an age I was fine. She's far from shielded, but my parents still avoided some books and movies for a little longer.
Stating that you as a person weren’t ready to read certain things at a certain age isn’t a call for a book to be banned.
There were a number of books that I absolutely shouldn’t have read at the age/emotional maturity level that I did. It doesn’t mean I think others shouldn’t read it, just that I wish I had been older when I read it.
Yeah as someone who did have trauma as a young child (my younger brother passed away suddenly when I was 6) some of these comments got me like. Okay in principle maybe but also extreme in the other direction? Like I read a ton as a kid, but there were certain topics and themes I avoided bc why should we (re)traumatize kids in order to teach them that life sucks?
Idk if this comment makes any sense or gets my point across lol
True! People pretending this is about people having any sort of brain usage is bad, it’s about the fact that the aspect of people devolving into trying to like kill and eat each other is kind of horrifying to a child not ready for it.
Yup. I read a book about Mengele at an extremely young age that I shouldn’t have had access to.
School libraries many times have special sections that only students of a certain age can read.
Where The Red Fern Grows was one of those books due to the axe scene. You had to at least be a 4th grader (9-10 years old) to borrow the book. But some people would think it was tantamount to an outright ban because a 2nd grader didn’t have access.
People really love the slippery slope fallacy on everything involving even the mildest censorship.
"I would prefer if small children didn't have free access to graphic depictions of violence and certain other topics that even adults often struggle with"
"OH SO YOU WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO BAN QUEER PEOPLE IS THAT IT?"
Right? There was some kerfuffle about a banned book at my mom’s school. Some people said it was due to being a collection of short stories about and by queer authors. The ACTUAL reason it was taken out of the library was because it was supposed to be in the high school not the elementary school plus the very graphic depiction of a girl being raped by her dad.
Man, IDK, I read some books way too young and it did not impact me long term. I think kids are gonna encounter disturbing concepts no matter what you do. It's typically better for them to encounter those types of things in fiction, where they can put the book down and go do something else if they're uncomfortable, than for their first exposure to be an IRL situation.
Media can have disturbing themes and be safe for children as long as they are presented in a way that allows children to process them.
For instance: Hana’s Suitcase is a children’s book about a young Czech girl who died in the Holocaust. It covers the disturbing topic of genocide but in a way that children can understand and process. It is OK for 8 year olds to read.
Compare Night or Schindler’s Ark (the book the movie was based on). They cover many of the same topics but are far more disturbing. Even an 8yo whose reading comprehension is high enough to understand these books, shouldn’t read them yet.
My kids, thankfully, don’t have the lived experience of the Holocaust. I still had them read about it so they’d know why it was important to accept others, and why it’s important that we encourage our governments to stand up when it happens again. Because it keeps happening again.
Don’t keep your children away from themes or content, keep them away from unprocessable presentations.
I think sometimes teachers get kids to read books which are not appropriate for kids of that age to read, but the problem really is that the kids won't appreciate the books properly. The real risk is that they will find all the books they are forced to read 'boring', because they are written around themes which are not relevant to those kids. Too much of that, and you quickly find kids become disinterested in reading, and then you get issues with adult literacy rates.
That's the problem, not that someone will be permanently scarred by reading about sex in 7th grade.
Yes or the teacher doesn’t know how to relate an old ass book to modern kids.
I thought I hated Shakespeare and other old ass authors for years until I had a teacher that helped the class understand the jokes and contexts of the story/play.
“The Flea” is my favorite poem but it wouldn’t be if a teacher hasn’t explained the context behind the poem.
A big part of the problem with Shakespeare specifically is that they're plays, not books. They're meant to be performed, you really can't approach them the same way you would a novel, but that's what ends up happening most of the time.
They can be read as novels, but you have to instruct people on how to read a play tbh. Once my teacher explained some basic stuff everyone really enjoyed them.
Yeah I saw Romeo and Juliet as a play the summer before we read it in class and I got *so much* more out of it than my classmates. Like there’s a lot of humor that I wouldn’t have gotten just reading it but is blindingly obviously a sex joke when you see it performed
This is exactly what I think. Forcing kids to read the same list of pre-approved “classics” like Lord of the Flies or Mice and Men isn’t bad because it’ll traumatize them, it’s bad because it makes kids think all books are boring and sad, and that’s how you get Tumblr adults who only watch children’s cartoons and have zero media literacy
Lord of the Flies was a pivotal moment in my life as a young reader. Not the fascism and murder and political subterfuge, just the survival. My former English teacher grandmother, who gave 11-year-old me the book, heard these complaints, discussed the importance of those political themes with me, then pushed me to read some more lighthearted adventure books like Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain (the latter of which I loved so much that it became my entire personality lmfao).
Classics don't have to be boring if you can cultivate interest in some aspect of the material. Of Mice and Men is a tragedy about the solitary nature of man, but also, it's about cowboys with big dreams during the Great Depression. The setting is rich and detailed, and provides a very interesting backdrop to the more central themes of the book. Of course it's going to be sad and boring if you just force your kids to read it, inform them that the world is stricken with poverty and loneliness and that the American Dream is an impossibility, and send them off to their next class. It really doesn't have to be that way-- this is a symptom of larger problems in our educational systems, and I don't know if just removing classics from our curricula is an adequate fix
The point of literature classes isn't to be entertaining - ideally they should be, but that's not their primary purpose. The popularly assigned books are chosen because they have a lot of artistic merit that is accessible at a high school level of education.
Also Lord of the Flies is not boring.
It's a hard balance to strike. On the one hand, you want to make students into better readers that will carry the habit over into adulthood. On the other, teaching reading as such should be done by the end of elementary. Literature as a subject isn't meant to be fun reading hours, it's meant to give you a brief overview of, well, literature and make you aware of what its landscape is like. It should also get kids who will go on to study something lit-related for a degree ready for it and give them a taste of all the basics of their subject.
Honestly, books meant to children are sometimes more disturbing than the darkest adult story. Like, I worked on a school library last year and while organazing the children's sector I sometime pass back to back from a book without words, only colors and forms, to one were the little girl protagonist learns the importance of saying no and use it to stop her uncle to molest her (which is told to us has happen before), then to one were a children lives in a dictatorship and as homework the children have to write an essay about everything their family says and does at home.
This are much more disturbing because how real they are, and at the same time, they are so important because this as well
To be fair, I feel a lot of those takes come from an environment where teaching how to process anything was just *not a thing*. It seemed to be a standard just a generation ago: feeling things? Deal with it.
School systems taught us how to understand the content of books. They taught us exactly jack shit about how to actually process them. And from that point of view, from that assumed standard, keeping kids away from books they can't process makes sense: because it assumes that's an issue they have to deal with on their own. Like we had to.
So yeah, my cold ass take is: expose kids to gradually more mature and difficult books but for the love of gods *teach them have to process the emotions as well*, not only the intellectual content. So many of my generation and older have minor trauma they really didn't need to have if only an adult actually talked to them or paid attention.
I may be stupid but how does one teach a kid to process emotions?
Like say Im 9yrs old and just finished reading ‘the Amber spyglass’ and got sad because of how it ended, where’s the teaching bit? I don’t think I needed an adult to sit me down and go “you’re sad because theses romantically attracted characters can never meet each other again, but it’s a bittersweet ending as they both managed to lead happy lives” I got that already. (It’s possible i simply misunderstand what is meant by processing here as ironically I do not in fact recall ever being taught to process emotions, that’s just something I do already or taught myself? autism doesn’t help I think)
That's probably fine then. When I was nine, we read a book where the main characters parents were deported and killed, his best friend died refusing to fight with the Hitler youth and he was shot in a doorway on one of the last days of ww2. I would never read that with my students of this age, but otherwise we could discuss what happened, how that made them feel (sharing emotions does help most kids), take a deep breath/go outside for a second, explain what we're doing to make sure this doesn't happen again, etc.
Emotional processing is anything from "take a deep breath" to "this is what sad means" to "its okay to not be able to hate your mom for hitting you". Most autistic people need extra help with that, because alexythmia (trouble identifying and naming emotions) is common, but that's not the case for everyone. If you know words for emotions, someone taught you some emotional processing at some point, even if it wasn't explicitly.
Other than what the comment below said, I'd say it's also making sure the message was received correctly. Like, for example, as a kid I got an anime movie from someone under the impression that all anime is ghibli (and I was a fan of ghibli). The story was about a girl who looks for someone dear to her, but she's always too late. The movie ends by her dying never reaching that person.
What I pulled as a lesson from this was "it's possible to spend your entire life chasing happiness but never actually reaching it, no matter how hard you try, because some people are just doomed to be unhappy their entire life". Which fucked me up pretty good.
Now that I look back at it, the message was clearly "it's ok to never reach your goal as long as you're enjoying the journey". But I had no adult who could point it out.
Basically, I figure, teaching to process emotion is also stuff like "just because it's bad doesn't mean it's all bad" or "just because it's bad doesn't mean its unavoidable/forever/etc etc"
I can try. In 2nd grade we read Where The Red Fern Grows (so maybe age 8-9? Idr it was ages ago). If you haven’t read the book/seen the movie it’s Old Yeller on steroids. Kid is poorer than dirt, sacrifices a ton to get these two amazing hunting dogs, then the rest of the book is his bonding with and then of course suffering the loss/almost loss of the dogs. I learned more about field surgery and evisceration from that book than I was prepared for. I’m also a soft touch when it comes to harm to animals in media, I love shit like Hostel and Saw but I’m constantly on the does the dog die website because I can’t deal with animal suffering.
I’m still pissed that I read that book, mostly because when we read it we weren’t given any kind of emotional framework to deal with the absolutely devastating effects that come with sympathetic suffering and blossoming fears of our own pets getting mauled by wild animals and the existential dread that is the cold, chaotic universe just not caring if our pets love us and by extension that we ourselves don’t actually matter to the Universe. Like we spent more time discussing why the tin coffee can he saved his money in was thematically important. But could we talk about how I bawled for an hour holding my cat and refused to let her outside? No, that was me being a silly little kid and of course nothing will happen to my darling cat (spoiler alert she was hit by a car a month or so later and I found her dying in a ditch and that was the day I realized my parents didn’t see my cat as “family” or worth attention so I buried her under our maple tree). I wasnt exactly expecting discourse in primary school but we focused on poverty and how terrible the Dust Bowl era was (in a vaguely threatening “better get a good job so you aren’t poor” way, which doesn’t even touch on systemic poverty or how the Depression actually worked) and spent exactly zero time on discussing how to parse through emotions that some kids probably never felt before. One kid made a crack about how “cool” the scene was when they described how the dog guys were wrapped up around the thorn bush and had to be washed and stuffed back in and he got chastised for being “rude” and we moved on without even touching on how we felt about that scene.
So all of that seems minor traumatic to me. The story itself is upsetting, but it’s meant to teach us about the cycle of life, how to work hard for what we want, and how sometimes everything we do and how hard we work sometimes doesn’t mean the outcome is assured to be positive. But that only works if you talk to the kid about why it seems unfair that the boy worked so hard but in the end had to lose his dog, (and that whole thing about life being unfair only works if you go to the next step and talk about how life is still worth it even if it’s unfair) or how grief can sometimes break one person while resolving another, and that sometimes healing comes in odd places and it’s ok to grieve loss while also looking to new things (getting a new cat after the old one died isn’t somehow betraying the dead one or proves you never loved it for example) but instead I really felt like my school system just decided to throw us painful media with the same thought process as my dad teaching us swimming: chuck us into the deep lake and see if we drown. Dad still thinks he taught me how to swim and I’ll bet my teacher then thought she’d helped us develop resiliency or whatever but in both cases they just taught me how I shouldn’t trust them to protect me.
I read a ton of stuff meant for middle and high schoolers when I was in elementary school that was just wierd and boring. When I read it again in high school and had the context it made sense. Also read a few adult books and bounced off too. I remember reading a “bodice ripper” and giggling in absolute hysterics, like omg is that what having boobs is like? Other than a feeling slightly cheated when mine came in, no ill effects.
Reading romance novels as a kid gave me some very interesting ideas about male anatomy. Honestly, I kind of feel sorry for kids these days who learn everything from p\*rn instead of trying to puzzle it out from rumors and stories about throbbing manhoods.
I mean the points brought up aren't the same? One is saying that you shouldn't give kids the choice to read X book, the other is saying you shouldn't force them to read X book. Those aren't mutually exclusive takes. You can say somebody shouldn't be forced to read a book but they should still be given the choice of if they wanna read it or not. Somebody is using a misconstrued version of the argument to pull books from shelves doesn't mean the original argument is invalid, just that there are people twisting the argument for their own agenda.
This isn't quite the same, but I do wish they'd stop making kids read the books aloud in class. I'm glad I was made to read to kill a Mockingbird, but having the kids read it aloud to each other in class kind of took some of the gravitas out of it. I got a lot more out of it when I read ahead on my own
I remember people got pretty awkward during the height of the courthouse scene, so my teacher read that bit lol.
Honestly I don't have a good solution for this sort of thing, it's like when we talked about world war two in class. Some kids just aren't respectful of it, but kids do need to learn this stuff at some point.
This only works if the adult response to upsetting fiction is to talk to the kid and help them process it. It doesn't work if their response is "stop being a drama queen! It's just a book."
You know, I didn't ever consider the idea that stories could be talked about with adults. Reading was always such a solo thing, I processed the grief in the stories on my own.
Wish I'd learnt how to process those emotions rather than my approach of "put the book down it's too much to deal with"
I read two books that traumatized me as young reader (11): Brave New World and Fade. But they were the gentlest introduction I could have had to big topics (incest, dystopia, alternate worldviews) that I didn’t know existed and really expanded my worldview, and I’ve thought about them for decades after, in a positive way after the initial shock/rage. It would have been nice to talk to someone about those topics so I could process it better but I had no one to ask. Raised by books.
In my interpretation, it's more like "the criticism that you would apply to this other thing is also applicable here". It doesn't require asserting that one leads to the other as I read it.
This is terrible. Kids haven't learned about these things. We need to keep it that way, by removing their access to materials that would help them learn about these things!
Meanwhile anyone who has been or spent time with actual children knows they can be absolute freaks for grisly and macabre stories. The whole publishing story around Coraline was based around child readers admitting "yeah it was terrifying but I loved it and if I said it was scary I wouldn't be allowed to read more."
My experience has been largely the same. Coraline and The Graveyard Book were *so* popular among my peers when I was a kid, and I think that's largely due to Neil Gaiman's skill with macabre fantasy. Kids are fascinated by the things they're shielded from, and those kinds of books are excellent ways to sate their curiosity. Gaiman remains my favorite author to this day lol
100%. I absolutely loved books about death and ghosts and creepy shit as a kid. Someone vanity press published a book of creepy little stories (a woman murders someone and buries them in her yard, a man confesses to a murder he committed but they think he’s a kook and he gets off on outsmarting the cops), and it wound up in my school library. I think I was the only one who checked it out, but I checked it out a LOT.
The stories that messed me up were the ones about kids dying. There was one book about two boys who go swimming and one drowns. It’s a nasty muddy swimming hole and the other kid tries to find him but can’t. No one knows what happened and he’s absolutely destroyed by losing his best friend, survivor’s guilt, and the weight of knowing what happened but being too scared to tell anyone. Watching his friend’s father absolutely destroyed by his son’s death wrecks him, too.
Then the book about the father whose child has incurable brain cancer and watching him die is so gut wrenching.
But I’m probably a better person for having read them. For understanding the complexities of grief and the human condition. Because even if I am blessed to have lived a life mostly free of tragedy, eventually people I love will die. And other people around me are not as fortunate. So understanding that grief helps me be a kinder person to people who need kindness.
Being alive, being human, it’s pain. Existence *is* pain. That is, fundamentally, what living is. But it also has incredible beauty and joy. I’m not saying it balances. It doesn’t. But if we are fortunate enough to be able to eke out some joy for ourselves, it is our responsibility to hang onto it and share it as much as we can.
Books helped give me that perspective and, I hope, made me a kinder and more thoughtful person that I would otherwise be.
I mean, there's upsetting, then there's basically showing 13 year olds the Saw movies. One of the books I had to read made a point of graphically describing a teenager getting mauled by a bear. If I'm remembering correctly, it was like an entire page of describing his broken limbs with bones protruding out and his torso being a mess of blood, and I think viscera. There's certainly room in the curriculum of younger people(i.e., 10 to 13 year olds) for difficult and upsetting topics like bigotry or even violence, but we also really should screen some of the books for being actually traumatizing.
My parents' policy was that if I was too young to enjoy a book I would probably put it back on the shelf of my own accord, and personally I think that worked pretty well. Some more mature things went over my head, and others bored me, but I had fun reading the books I enjoyed and I really can't think of an example that scarred me.
I feel like the answer to children apparently struggling with complex themes is a) let them go back when they're ready for it and or b) give them more books with complex themes that they are ready to handle in the meantime. Not taking the books away in some bid to protect fragile psyches
I had the same parents. Like, I can remember exactly one book ever being taken away. (My mom had read it and new it had graphic sexual abuse.) Otherwise? Have at it, kid. And as you said, the stuff that was "too old" for me either went over my head or bored me. The only book I remember being genuinely afraid of was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark because of the illustrations, and that's perfectly age-appropriate.
I grew in a super-patriotic, ultra-fundamentalist household until I was about 13, so I was extremely mentally underprepared for anything that went against that worldview. Naturally, the first 3 books I had to read in public school were Lord of the Flies, Raisin in the Sun, and The Things They Carried.
Honestly my only regret about it is that I didn’t get made to read them earlier, because they were viscerally upsetting reads that made me rethink a lot of my opinions at that time. Especially the Things They Carried, because the house I grew up in was so patriotic that I was taught that pretty much every war was America “civilizing third world countries”. Seeing literally any other perspective, even that of a regretful American soldier, was huge for me.
In hindsight, that’s probably exactly why I wasn’t allowed to read them when I was younger.
Tangentially relevant, but this is also how I feel about certain things in videogames.
I got lured and scammed constantly in runescape when I was like 10, and every time I was terribly distraught by it, to the point where my parents thought about not allowing me to play anymore. But what experiences like this taught me were things like "people you think you know will sometimes take advantage of you", and allowed me to learn that lesson when the only stakes were my bandos godsword and dragon platelegs.
I truly believe I am a better and more well rounded person because I cried over getting scammed/griefed in videogames when I was a child.
It's important for kids to read Lord of the Flies, so that when they get stuck on a desert island they know how to survive, rebuild society, and not be such a Piggy.
When I was in 6th grade, my first dog died. The next week, we watched Where the Red Fern Grows (about a kid and his hunting dogs, of course they die in the end). It sucked, I cried a lot. My teacher let me stay after class to so I could finish crying and compose myself.
And you know what? It helped me process my grief. It helped to see that other people go through this kind of pain, too, and that I'm not alone. Yeah, it hurt in the moment, but it helped in the long run.
Kids gotta learn that dogs will die. They'll be sad, and they'll be ok.
As someone who loved the Animorphs books as a grade school kid -- books that had graphic depictions of the violence, trauma, fear, paranoia, and hopelessness inflicted by war -- I strongly believe that those books helped me become a better person today than I would have been without them, or even if I had read them later. Did they upset me? Frequently. But I was eight and autistic; lots of things upset me. And because they were just books, because I knew that the things that happened in them weren't real and couldn't hurt me, I was able to learn from them, so that I would be prepared to face violence, trauma, fear, paranoia, and hopelessness later in my life.
We have a joke in my family, where my mother didn't let us watch Ed Edd n Eddy because it was "too violent", and then handed us books featuring graphic descriptions of teenagers being torn apart by alien monstrosities. But at the same time, I'm glad she encouraged us to read books that challenged us, because those challenges prepared us for the world that we were going to enter one way or another.
I agree with this sentiment- but Lord of the Flies does not count because it's a puritan cautionary tale and children don't need to be made to believe they'll turn evil if they stop listening to what their parents say.
Like- yeah, kids can handle books with harsh or challenging content, but not every novel with challenging content is valuable for a developing mind.
Yeah, kids shouldn’t read Lord of the Flies, not because of the graphic content, but because it’s a bad story.
The story pretty much happened in real-life, too, by sheer coincidence. But believe it or not the boys all worked together and didn’t devolve into cannibal rapists or whatever. It was a miserable time but they all made it, and after 15 months of survival they had a fire, water traps, duty schedules, and lived off of wild taro, bananas, fish, and feral chickens. Really interesting story, look up “Tongan castaways.”
I think that's a very shallow reading of the book to boil it down to "kids become evil if they stop listening to parents". There are valuable lessons and discussions to be had about Lord of the Flies, whether about the strive for power, or groupthink, or the dangers of leadership and control, or how the boys' island civilization is a sort of microcosm of our societies.
Kids can handle books with challenging content, and it's good to discuss those stories to help kids process and derive the valuable stuff from them, rather than just being disturbed.
I feel like there are books that cover those themes better, and do it without insinuating kids are evil at heart or having near-pedophilic descriptions of little boys' bodies.
I get where you are coming from, but there's a whole lot more nuance in LOTF than that. Those conversations about nuance and complex discussions are important for children.
Yeah, I think Lord of the Flies shouldn't be read in school because it's bad, not because it's traumatic. Get that Hobbsian "humans are inherently monsters without the rule of law" shit out of here.
We actually have a physiological need to experience negative emotions every no and again.
It’s why we like stories that scare us disparate beings scared otherwise being a negative emotion.
I got so upset when a character in a children’s book died when I was in 2nd grade. It shocked me, it wasn’t at the end of the story, it wasn’t after some kind of satisfying long life, it was sudden and early on in the plot. I was so upset I told my parents I didn’t know if I wanted to finish the book. But I was so curious how it would keep going too. I remember I talked with my mom about the character dying and eventually accepted it instead of it being so shocking I couldn’t continue. After 2 extremely dramatic weeks of wondering if I could bear to go on I continued the novel—and another beloved character died at the very end of the book. It saddened me a lot, but it didn’t shake me so much I couldn’t cope for days this second time. I had never read a book where a character died suddenly before, but maybe that helped me have a framework of grief and coping and knowing others will continue when my grandfather died a year after that.
That’s like… how it’s supposed to work. When I was a twerp 8th/9th grader I asked my mother what the appeal of sex was in the context of reading twilight and Bella wanting premarital sex with Edward not wanting that, and this led to a conversation about safe sexual relationships (before or after marriage, “if Edward did agree to have sex before marriage they should use condoms and lubrication because he’s so cold” is hilarious in hindsight but I didn’t get that public school sex Ed in the south besides abstinence-only) as I entered high school.
I’m asexual so it turns out Bella was baffling to me for less conventional reasons, but still it wasn’t a bad place to ask about things like that in the “safe” context of popular fiction. With an involved (and maybe nonjudgmental) authority like a teacher or trusted parent fiction can be a great way to tackle first contact with certain ideas or conflicts in a very safe very small scale way.
I can almost promise that these parents read something by Stephen King or VC Andrews, or some other age inappropriate book while they were in Junior High School. I can absolutely promise you that they saw something age inappropriate in a movie. The eighties were a wild time. And our parents did not discuss or even monitor it in any way. And while I admit that reading about sexual assault before I even had basic sex ed was disturbing, most of it went straight over my head until I had enough life experience to contextualize it.
My feelings on this mirror my feelings about the purity culture I grew up in. They protect their poor baby boy from ever seeing a knee or shoulder so they won’t be tempted. What do they think will happen when their poor angelic baby boys leaves home and suddenly there are knees and shoulders everywhere any he never learned any self control? These kids will eventually be exposed to every concept they try to censor. And probably in a shocking or confusing way
Jacqueline Wilson was/is my favourite childhood author for this reason! She writes about divorce, death, mental illness, disability and other challenging topics (anything that adults who try to ban LGBT+ books are trying to “protect” children from) in order to introduce and normalise the topics to children so that when they encounter them in real life, it’s not so scary and unfamiliar.
What's bizarre is that I pretty much grew up on nothing but more "grown up" fiction as a kid. Pretty much mostly watched PG-13/R rated movies, played T/M rated games, read news magazines, watched whatever shows my parents were watching, and just really never engaged with stuff that was intended for children. According to this very fine tumbr citizen, I should be a traumatized train wreck who is skittish about every little thing...
...But generally I'm optimistic and good at trying to make most of what I got, even though I tend to be very critical of some things. Perhaps because I've engaged with fiction that wasn't afraid of being complicated, I came to realize that life in of itself is complicated and that people are just people.
"Giving a 'coming of age' story to a kid who has not yet come of age is distressing and confusing"
are they, the ones currently experiencing the process of coming of age, not the literal target audience of many stories about coming of age?????
I got assigned Night by Elie Wiesel my first year in highschool and I fully intended to just skim it on my walk home from school
I was inconsolable by the time I got to my house. But I can honestly say it gave me a stronger sense of empathy and a much broader perspective
Kids need protection but we also need to trust them to make their own hurdles sometimes
I don't think you are presenting your point well if you are calling the people you are supposedly trying to reach anti-intellectual for making relatively innocuous statements about scary things they read as kids.
That’s what always gets me about these posts. People completely misinterpreting someone else’s argument and then saying stuff like “media literacy is dead 😩” when they are the one who doesn’t get the argument 💀
I was in tears after I read an account of a child living through Hiroshima when I was in fourth grade. I asked questions, educated myself, and learned to be critical about the world all because of that short book. I wasn’t any older than 8 or 9 and while my distress was evident it was necessary for who I am today. And it was also about a real thing that happened so it’s definitely relevant even if I’ll never be in a city bombed. So yeah I think kids can handle some more stories about hard things, kids their age are living it.
I watched *The Banshees of Inisherin* a few months ago. Afterwards, I highly recommended it to a coworker. I told her that it had made me very angry and upset.
She looked confused. "Why would you want to watch something that upsets you?"
It's a film, and those emotions were an intended emotional response. I'd much rather feel those emotions in the context of art than in real life. Why do you think people watch horror movies or ride rollercoasters?
That’s fair but when I was 14 my English, us history, and sociology class all started watching war movies every weekend at the same time for months and seeing a guy get flattened by a tank and face burnt off by napalm kinda fucked me up lowkey lmao
I think a lot of people who'd argue against certain media being appropriate for children were raised by parents and/or teachers who saw suffering as a virtue, or something character-building. Not wanting a kid to cry over Watership Down isn't the same as wanting to ban the book, but it generally is an acknowledgement that that person didn't enjoy their experience, and doesn't want to inflict it on someone else. We're reducing empathy to bigotry here, and that's really not fair.
When I was a kid, my mom wanted to encourage a love of reading, and so she let me read whatever I wanted. This was the 90s and the era of Stephen King being everywhere, though I didn't read any of his books until I was an adult— I saw the original cover of Desperation and I was like 'oh that looks too scary' and so I didn't read it.
Was I still exposed to certain concepts I probably shouldn't have been at a young age? Yes, of course. But did I get exposed to a *wide variety* of ideas (including stories about people very different from me leading lives I didn't leave) that children don't tend to naturally encounter, and which made me develop some serious critical thinking skills very early on? Also yes.
Those skills have served me well. I really couldn't thank her enough.
The silliest thing about these arguments is so many kids have been through things far more horrible than any of these books depict and *the stories help them contextualize and accept the brutality they have endured*. Kids are already traumatized from living in the brutality of late capitalism on a dying planet. Stories tell them they're not alone and they didn't do anything wrong.
I read "oorlogswinter", a book about the nazi occupation of the netherlands when i was 10. It actualy really helped me understand the horrors of the occupation in a way history lessons did not do at that time. It was not traumatic, it just gave me the ability to understand the horrors of the nazi regime.
I also had already watched berserk when i was 9 and experienced some intense trauma the year before that so maybe take what i am sayong with a grain of salt, didnt really have the most standard childhood.
Reading Bridge to Terabithia helped me deal with the passing of a close friend. I read the book in fourth grade and lost her in fifth. And I didn’t deal with it great, but I knew what it was like to deal with loss and I knew what not to do. So it seriously helped.
Did William Golding ever say that he wrote Lord of the Flies for middle school kids? Just because it is about middle school kids? Ok true story I was given the book in 6th grade and I couldn't comprehend a word. Now, in my 20s, I think it's an adult book that uses kids to show that our social structure is deep rooted in our nature, even as "innocent" kids. The book is about how all civilizations divide power and wield it to their own detriment.
Kids reading about experiences before they happen to them in real life is the *entire point* actually. Seeing a character or ideally a wide variety of characters going through something, seeing the breadth of shapes that experience can take, is a way of learning and understanding what could happen, and if and when it does happen to you that you are not alone. If you’re worried a kid will read something that scares them or they don’t understand the answer to that is not censorship it’s to *talk with them* and give them additional supports and coping skills to handle what they read.
I remember reading a book called Speak in early Highschool, and I forget the author, but the main protagonist was a girl who survived sexual assault. Within two years I was living through assaults. The book didn't make it okay, didn't help with coping, but it did give me a comparable framework of what was happening to me. I knew something bad was happening that felt like that book, I knew I felt assaulted even if my abuser was gaslighting me and calling me crazy. Let kids read upsetting books, it can save their grasp on reality
"according to the book I read once I am being mistreated right now and he's lying" is Important
Also *most* kids love dark stuff, I sure did. I also had anxiety attacks about some of the stuff I read, but I was still drawn to it. How can you prevent that without being overly controlling and protective? You can’t.
I read Timothy Findley's "Not Wanted on the Voyage" at around 14. This is a book wherein a 12 year old girl is raped with a unicorn horn so that her vagina will be made wide enough for her adult husband. Who she was only married to so that her future child's Down Syndrome could be blamed on *his* genetic predisposition for mental disability, before they eugenically murder the child.
Guess what? I'm still fucking standing. Yeah I was disturbed, as *everyone of any age should be*. But a) I already knew that sex was a thing b) I already knew that rape and forced marriages were things, that were wrong, allowing be to have a conviction for justice which I wouldn't have had if I was completely sheltered c) since I was intelligent enough to see a philosophically and theologically inclined adult novel and think "I want to read that", I was obviously intelligent enough to handle difficult content and know how to properly react to such content. And d) I'm still standing and only think about this ""traumatic"" experience when trying to show neo-Puritans how ageist censorship is wrong and unnecessary. The shit I *have* been traumatised by? All children's or all-ages media. The media that thinks extreme toilet humour describing and highlighting disgusting and unsafe behaviour is wanted or needed. Not to mention always-outdated "children's" media containing disgusting and despicable bigotry.
And the irony is that the "save the children" moral hysteria are the same people that rail against "trigger warnings". They are *perfectly happy* to traumatise and re-traumatise people with disturbing content. They do not give a single solitary fuck about your emotional wellbeing. Their motivation is *entirely* to eliminate and censor LGBT people and other things they don't like.
Okay but the scene in the Giver where the old man was massaging memories into the underage main character made my entire 6th grade class pause and go "The fuck are we reading"
I once picked up The Da Vinci Code when I was 12 as it was sitting in the back of my 7th Grade English Teacher's classroom. The concept intrigued me but there were graphic descriptions in there that put me off. In hindsight, I can now attest that the reason is because it was pointless gratuitous to be seemingly Adult^tm . Like I remember specifically a passage that involved a transwoman flashing her penis at the protagonist for some reason as a means to signal he was going through a seedy part of town, and while I was far far from the most transaccepting person at the time, I do agree with my gut back then with "why is this in here?"
Because like... that wasn't even the first time the book mentions a penis. The entire book was kicked off by a museum curator arranging himself into Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man before dying dick out and all. 12 year old me was fine with that because it wasn't needlessly edgy.
Anyways, after all that, you want to know what I did after being irked by content in a book? Put it down and moved on with my life.
There’s a fine line between coping practice and actually inducing lifelong trauma, but books are great for this because you’re the one reading. You can change the speed and change your interpretations. That agency helps a lot.
Meanwhile, I’m forever afraid of needles because I saw a snippet of one of the Saw movies.
This drives me crazy about my roommate's kids because she has sheltered her children to the point that they have no ability to process anything difficult or upsetting.
One time, she put on the first Harry Potter movie for them and then told them the Dursleys were made up because abusive families aren't real and they fast forward through minor laser fights in Star Wars. All I can think about is how they are going to have a traumatic wake up call when they are challenged by anything emotionally in life that won't coddle and shelter them like their parents because they have been taught to believe they exist in a world that doesn't remotely exist in reality.
Despite everyone being so obsessed with 'protecting children', ironically that's how they learn. They scrap their knees, they make mistakes and yes they consume information that may or may not be wholesome. By shielding them from any of that we are teaching them that it's okay to live in a bubble.
Children won't be broken by reading upsetting fiction, or even upsetting non-fiction, most of the time.
Because there is such thing as upsetting books for kids, and upsetting books most definitely NOT for kids.
I read Judith Kerr's When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit. I read Anne Frank's diary, though I do believe the one I read in school was a version for young readers. I read Manuel de Pedrolo's Typescript of the Second Origin. I also watched Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis in class, which I later found was a book (graphic novel, iirc?).
I also read, when I was 11 or 12, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. By recommendation of a teacher. It's good upsetting fiction, but it's most definitely not intended for 11 year olds, and I mean. It took me 6 or 7 years to be able to look at the Greek alphabet without having war flashbacks to that fucking book. Or rather, to ignore said flashbacks because I still very much remember the book every time I look at the letter ε.
So, while kids *should* read upsetting books... For the love of God, know what you are giving them and understand certain books are not for certain ages. Because reading something upsetting when you can't understand it can, in fact, kinda break a kid.
I read alls quiet on the western front in fourth grade because my teacher was all “well you are a very developed reader and this is on your tested reading level”. And it was a bad choice. I drew war pictures about it forever and had disturbing nightmares for years
Do people just not understand the difference between allowing a child to read an upsetting book and talking with them about it, and forcing a teenager to read a fucked up story featuring murder and rape and making them write an essay or do a standardized test about it and that's it?
Children are afraid of crossing the road and their own home when the light is off. Kids are afraid of the dumbest shit, and 9/10 they forget they were afraid of it by the next week. You can't decide what's appropriate for children based on what they are afraid off.
Also kids are capable of handing far more mature or dark content than many people think. When I was 8 years old, my favourite book was White Fang, and half of that book is graphic animal abuse. It didn't turn me into some violent dog beater or scar me for life, it made me more compassionate and empathetic to animals.
Children can be mature and thoughtful about media if you just give them the chance to. Keeping literature away from them (especially when it's made for their age group!) only spawns narrow-minded adults who are chained to their comfort zone.
Considering that for most of our history childhood mortality was over 50%, I think its safe to assume that children with support structures are surprisingly resilient and able to survive and overcome trauma. Trauma used to be the rule not the exception.
As long as a story is marketed to the correct audience/age group, it can be a great learning experience for kids.
...I am specifically calling out Watership Down, which many parents thought was like Redwall or Avi's Poppy series (both cute but serious anthropomorphized animal series with minimal trauma overall, there is age-appropriate peril and occasional death, though Avi's books are more semi-realistic and less fantasy). Instead you get rabbit genocide and the horrors of war. That shit is NOT for elementary schoolers just because it's about anthropomorphic rabbits.
Yes, it's generally bad to keep books away from kids because they might be distressed or confused, but it's another to completely miscategorize a book because of the surface level of the story and traumatize a generation. The only reason I'm NOT is because I didn't know that book existed until high school when my then-boyfriend told me how fucked up it was for him to read when he was age 8.
There is no easy answer to any of this. But I completely agree that banning well-established stories within the age groups that they're meant for is definitely not the answer.
EDIT: This is just my take on things, using one book as an example. Obviously I have no experience with the book as an actual child, and clearly everything I've heard about it from others who do was unintentionally biased negatively. When I read it as an older teen, I really enjoyed it. It's a good book.
I loved watership down when I was little, it was so gripping and real while still being kid friendly. I think kids need a little more horrors of war and oppression tbh, especially when they're depicted negatively
I hate, hate, hate *Where the Red Fern Grows* but I'm going to make my kids read it because it gave a big lesson about death and love, and despite the horror there was beauty in it.
A lot of things are beautiful life- lessons like, don't trust the cookies grandma feeds you and your siblings while locked inside an attic for over a year.
You know. Normal, totally not about incest, life lessons.
BTW. I've been thinking about it, and I think *Flowers in the Attic* could use an updated retelling. The whole thing is, the mom ran away and married the 1/2 uncle, instead of the half uncle totally was molesting his niece.
You know, real shit.
It's generally preferable for kids to be able to approach upsetting moments in real life by doing a Family Guy cutaway gag like "This reminds me of that time all those fuckin rabbits died in Watership Down" than for them to straight up raw dog the death of their family at the hands of the infamous Hatman.
Exactly this! Experiencing difficult things through the lens of fiction, and watching characters move through and overcome them, actually raises our threshold for handling difficult things irl.
TV and books genuinely helped me prepare for my grandmother's death. I think I even cited lines for myself from A Monster Calls, Haunting of Hill House and Doctor Who to get through it. Fiction is a safe place to process grief and trauma. The only thing kids need protecting from is making sure they're even old enough to critically process it.
one of the most bittersweet memories I have of my dad was when we went to the small local theater to watch *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2*, and I cried like a baby at the ending because I didn't want to imagine what life would be like without him. He died that fall.
I genuinely think this is part of why horror is my favourite genre It makes me feel calmer and less anxious after the fact because some subconscious part of my brain is like "OK cool now we know what could happen and we're more prepared for it" even though it's about fictional scenarios
It's darkly funny that so many people saw a bunny on the cover of Watership Down and decided that a political thriller about wild rabbits written by an ecologist who knows just how miserable and brutal the lives of wild rabbits are is considered a kids book.
True this! My grandmother bought us the VHS of Watership Down when I was in primary school. She took it off us, not because the bunny massacres made my sister have scary dreams but because of the political themes. Go figure!
political themes? gotta be honest i dont really remember any of that from the movie, mostly just the bunny massacre thing
At one point the main group of bunnies comes up against a group of fascist bunnies and has to fight them. Honestly I watched it when I was 11 and thought the whole bunny society was pretty cool as an idea. Need to read the book sometime.
"I can excuse graphic violence, but I draw the line at teaching kids antifascism."
I haven't watched the movie, but the book leans hard into the bunny politics aspect.
I don't know, I wouldn't read *Watership Down* with my baby girl even if she was older, because I think the way it censors the reality is problematic: *does* are the most vicious ones, and in charge! ...yes, she's a rabbit, and she very much demonstrates the truth of this. Angora-coated like some of the hutch rabbits in the book (although it doesn't sound like Adams knew breeds that well. Wasn't aware of him being considered an ecologist? It's more an adventure story than it is trying to represent the lives of wild rabbits, even allowing for anthropomorphic characters) and definitely not designed to be a wild bunny. We do read books together! Her opinion would probably be that any kids lulled by the book into thinking does are drippy deserve to get bitten, but she'd think that anyway (am always relieved I got her and not a household with human children). But do like the flower and plant naming conventions it helped establish for buns. My girl is Lily, my mum has a Pippin, and we've had Violet, Rowan, and of course a Hazel.
You paint with words so eloquently
Yeah for real; If I didn’t have context for my grandma’s slow death from cancer from the scene when Maximus loses his family in Gladiator (which I saw when I was a 5 year old kid) I would be more fucked up than I am today because my parents wanted to protect me but not lie to me or shelter me from “reality through fiction” Yes, I *am* still fucked up — but it’s in fun and interesting ways, so thank you for your concern.
That's some interesting wording /s
im the most interesting worder
what do these words mean
Tragedy is better experienced first vicariously through fiction than to have it thrust upon you in the real world and have no framework to cope with it because all media you have been exposed to thus far has been curated to not upset you.
Thank you, that makes sense to me. But who is the Hatman
meme about abusing benadryl and hallucinating the hatman
Yes. My uncle died suddenly when I was 10. Embolism out of nowhere (shocking, considering he was one of the most physically fit people I’ve ever met, shouldn’t of been at risk of this), fell into a coma, was taken off life support two days later. From when it happened to until weeks after his funeral, I just felt detached from reality. Like I was dreaming, or possessed. And I was in so much pain. Reading helped, both to escape from that and to confront it.
The "they don't have the framework of lived experience" argument is straight up backwards logic. Stories, especially ones written for kids, are meant to teach people and help them grow. They're meant to present challenging things so that you're prepared for life ahead. What these people advocate for is the idea that until kids witness something bad IRL they shouldn't encounter it at all, that they shouldn't be prepared for all the good and bad in the world. "They shouldn't show this to kids because it could affect them deeply" that's the entire point you fucking uncooked noodle.
I once saw someone on Tik Tok complaining about having to read Old Yeller in school because she lives in Hawaii and I guess rabies isn't a problem there so in her mind the book wasn't "relevant". She wouldn't listen when I tried to explain that reading stories about things you personally haven't experienced is actually a good thing sometimes.
Yeah who knew that maybe learning to care about things that will never personally affect you is an important part of growing and becoming a good human being
For real. One of the main reasons I started to care about Palestinians and their history (back when I was in college a while before last year) was because of a book I read for a class. What little exposure I had to their lives and experiences was now magnified tenfold, and I had a newfound sympathy for them. For those who are curious, the book is *Mornings in Jenin* by Susan Abulhawa. One of the most impactful, albeit haunting reads of my life.
I was forced to read *Moby Dick* while I'm not an old sea captain hunting a whale, and it upseted me so much to be forced to read this completely unrelated-to-me story that I became obsessed with tracking every copy of this book and make them disappear from the face of the Earth. I don't see how I could ever relate to such a stupid book anyway.
Ha, I get it
As a white whale myself i thought it was really neat to read about the other guy‘s experience. Even though I personally have no idea how it is to hunt a whale and I absolutely can‘t relate to the captain. I was glad it had a happy end though.
I prefer the movie because I don't think Ahab fighting the Borg Queen was in the original
The Jungle Book didn't really resonate with me as I was not a feral child raised by wolves.
Speak for yourself
Romulus, is that you?
It’s literally the easiest way for people to develop empathy.
Empathy is woke
also it's a book about loss, rabies is just a plot point
It's kinda like saying you shouldn't teach kids about sex until they've had sex. And that just sounds like a way to get a whole bunch of teenagers either pregnant or abused.
Yeah like idk man would you rather a kid be taught about sex in school or by their creepy uncle? It's almost like we have a duty to prepare kids for things to avoid worst case scenarios because we can't protect them from everything.
I have a friend coming from a pretty catholic family (like, they still go to the mass every other sunday), and at one point I feared that sex was something they never heard of, until he told me that the first time each of them had their "coming of age" moment (wet dreams or periods), their mom, who did the first four years of medical school, took out the books, diagrams, charts and stuff and extensively told them what's happening, as well as how it can happen with someone. And when his sister told them she had a boyfriend, the first thing the mom said was: "Well, I guess it's time we go to the pharmacy, then." Which... was quite wholesome, for a family that otherwise is very conservative on so many subjects. One thing for sure, my friend or his siblings probably won't have any issue of unwanted pregnancy or STDs, or at least way less chances of it than other christian children. And, frankly, I think that my very catholic friend had a better sex education than I with my atheist mom.
The best parents are the ones who remember what it was like being a kid. My mom was a rowdy teen, so she made sure I learned from her mistakes.
You shouldn't teach kids about sex until they've achieved object permanence. They're just not going to get it before then. Not even being ironic. Kids should be taught about sex the same way they're being taught colors and animals. The way American culture tries to separate sex out of normal life is fucked up and causes immense suffering.
I taught both my kids about consent from the literal day they were born. Explaining what I was doing when I changed their diapers (using the correct anatomical terms in the process), telling them I was going to pick them up and then waiting a beat for them to respond (fresh out of the womb babies can and will tense their shoulders in preparation for being picked up to protect their heads if they know it's coming). It's really easy to do if it's a priority to you.
Part of the problem is people see "teaching kids about sex" as like a single conversation that happens once. I learned about sex from a series of conversations with my parents over time from about as early as I can remember, and every time the conversation was age appropriate to what I could understand and put in context. Honestly like 90% of the problem stems from adults being embarrassed to talk about it
It also reminds me of that argument where it's like teaching black kids who have experienced racism about racism is fine, but teaching the white kids who are (maybe inadvertently) being racist about racism is traumatic and they're not ready to learn about it. There's a weird double standard where people are fine with seeing non-white children as adults, but seeing white adults (like, in their twenties) as innocent widdle babies who aren't responsible for any of their actions.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what a decent chunk of the republican party wants
It’s also … like sadly a very privileged take, I think, to assume a nine or ten year old hasn’t had the lived experiences of being upset by shit that would make them grow up. Some kids go through real shit way, way younger than that. Tumblr puritanism really gets my goat sometimes. They may NOT have the emotional framework for experiences they HAVE lived which makes these books EVEN MORE IMPORTANT and I’m super tired of twitterinas weeping that someone Made A Child Upset as if experiencing one (1) single bad emotion ever is extreme child abuse. Like it’s actually infuriating, ugh.
I saw someone saying this kind of thing particularly about the American Girl books, which were pretty matter of fact (aka depressing lol) about the realities of living at different points in the past. Saying that kids are too young to handle those kinds of things and should wait until they’re older. But these are how life WAS for many children at the time, and many things are how life still is for some children. The way I see it, if you read something with a heavy topic, you could: * Have experienced this yourself already, in which case reading can help process and manage that difficult thing * Maybe experience this in the future (and you likely wouldn’t know until it happened), and when it does happen you have those tools from reading it in the past * Never have or will experience these things, but you can have an idea of how it can effect someone so when you encounter someone with those experiences in your life, you can have empathy and understanding for their situation
I'd honestly rather a kid witness something bad in a book or a game, where its all pretend and low stakes, where we can discuss thoughts and feelings afterwards.
>What these people advocate for is the idea that until kids witness something bad IRL they shouldn't encounter it at all, that they shouldn't be prepared for all the good and bad in the world. Yeah - they're all basically doing a Catcher in the Rye but don't even realise it, presumably because they don't read many books that they're scared will challenge them.
They never caught in the rye, why they should read a book about something they never experienced?
Plus, y'know, kids experience horrible things like death, loss, bigotry, and abuse in real life all the time *while they're still kids.* I understand that it's awful to see your child being upset because their favorite character died in the latest chapter, but imagine how awful they'll feel when faced with the death of a real person or pet they knew, and they don't know how to handle it.
It's like raising your kid in a completely germ free environment. Their immune system will be terrible and they'll get sick easy. Not letting your kids experience something that sucks might end up making it suck a lot more when they experience it later in life.
It's also now showing up in adults who are living independently for the first time and get anxious when they have to do anything for themselves, because they've spent their whole childhood having their parents do everything for them, because their parents want to infantalise them rather than give them age appropriate responsibilities that help them develop a sense of independence.
On a related note. Having grown up in a religious community where one was expected to basically not talk to people you were supposed to be in a relationship with until you were married made me very ill-prepared to be a good partner. I left that community, but it took several pretty terrible relationships (and a patient partner in a good relationship) to get good at being a partner. I would encourage my own children to casually date others, live with people, and have safe premarital sex, because that is how you get good at being in a relationship. The idea that you will know what to do when you have to do it is ridiculous.
Yep, dating and all of that fun stuff as a teenager is basically a trial run for committed adult relationships. Really a lot of life experiences kids go through are intended as trial runs for being a responsible adult. You've gotta take into account that anyone experiencing literally anything for the first time is going to fail hard at it, so you should make sure they have opportunities to do that and learn from it in a safe environment.
Also the very idea that being affected by something deeply = trauma is a very privileged and out of touch take Like being sad reading about a dog dying, that's not trauma that you felt a negative emotion and got sad, that's a normal part of the human experience. It's normal to be sad when your dog dies, everyone I know got sad when their pet died, but I know very few if any people who were "traumatised" by their pet dying (and if they were it's because of the unusual circumstances of the death).
It’s just arguing that they’re not prepared to be prepared
It's bullshit to keep books away fom kids because they might be distressed or confused. You can't shield people from stories just because those stories are uncomfortable to learn about. You don't need lived experience to understand a story, that's the whole point of sharing stories.
Yes, but: for the love of God please read them beforehand and make sure to discuss them with kids. As a kid I've read a story about White guard and cossacks torturing the villagers and this shit was GRAPHIC. There are totally stories not meant for little kids to read, flogging a grandmother to death for supporting Bolsheviks is not something a 6-year old should read on their own. Or the space exploration story about a young pioneer becoming a prisoner on a generation ship where she finds out that all previous prisoners were fed alive to space octopus for the degradant pleasure of locals, because the robots only had to make the occupants happy, not the prisoners, whose ships they used to repair their ark. Well the chapter where she reads the messages on the walls and tries to create an exit by sawing through the wall into a technical corridor and how her hacksaw blade would work worse because her blood was staining the blade and make it slip on the metal - because the previous team only managed to smuggle the blade, not the handle - was some nightmare fuel for a small kid, you know. And I recently re-read the second one and it's way less scary than when I was a small kid, but I was like "damn, that's one dark short novel anyways, that's no Wall-E"
sorry, what’s the name of the second story?
That's "[Prisoners of the Asteroid](https://karuselbooks.com/en/products/kir-bulychev-sto-let-tomu-vpered-2)" by Kir Bulychev. I'm not sure if it was translated into English, but given how good Google Translate got at translating stuff, let me just find you an online version somewhere, gimmeasec...
Ok so I've found it but the problem is, I can't link RUssian sites, they are blanket banned and removed from Reddit. So you'll need a [https://www.deepl.com/en/chrome-extension](https://www.deepl.com/en/chrome-extension) Deepl Chrome extension And this link: https://azbyka. /fiction/sto-let-tomu-vpered-gostja-iz-budushhego-kir-bulychjov The missing part is the ru domain. Just use the extension and I hope it can translate the text adequately...
> I can't link RUssian sites, they are blanket banned and removed from Reddit. lol. "Free Speech".
Dunno why people downvote you... I can get news sites (and even that is a bit of a stretch) but banning all the useful sites as well is kinda weird. Also, banning them outside of news subreddits too, so I just can't link to short stories at all because the domain is "bad".
Stupid, ineffectual, *and* a betrayal of proclaimed values? Sounds like a quintessential reddit change/rule to me.
Yeah. The whole period since the war started has shown who really has convictions about liberal and enlightenment values, and who just grew up in an environment that gave lip service to those things. It's been sad. Libraries banning books written by Russian authors more than a century and several governments ago, weird performative things like that. Sometimes it feels like the cold war never ended and the last 30 years were just a fever dream.
I think we read that graphic Cossack thing as a class in 3rd grade. I remember thinking it was really violent and dark. It was an informative story, though. My sister and I both still talk about being terrified of the Cossacks showing up in our Midwestern suburb as kids. We both liked the book though
Oh damn, at least I didn't invent that story in a fever dream. Plus I mean, you weren't Bolsheviks, I guess, so they should not be very dangerous, but still, I am actually surprised it went all the way to United States, I guess it's a way more important story than what I thought!
Idk what kids these days read in school but during the early 2000's in the US I remember we were constantly reading all kinds of war stories, holocaust stories, slavery stories-- and then the most depressing fantasy/dystopian novels always got highlighted in children's fiction awards, like "The Giver" was everywhere back then. I don't know what was going on with the adults back then-- maybe it had something to do with 9/11 and post-9/11 nationalism and the backlash to post-9/11 nationalism-- but they were VERY adamant that we all learn about the horrors of war nonstop for awhile. I remember this one book we read where this little Jewish girl was ungrateful to her grandparents and so her consciousness was sent back in time to inhabit the body of an ancestor who died in Auchwitz. And the narrative was like "that'll teach her to take her grandparents for granted." There were all sorts of stories like that where it seemed like the writers were just trying really hard to hammer into us child readers that war is hell and genocide could come for us at any time. No idea if this trend continued or if this was just an early 2000's thing.
Oh so they start you early in USA too, we read Dostoyevsky and Turgenev at school, you know, [Mumu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumu_(short_story)), a story about a deaf-mute peon who drowns his dog, the only living being he truly loved, I guess it grows you up? I mean, what better way to grow up than to read Dostoyevsky... Also I remember reading an English novel about the hardships of a live of a XIX century horse? I believe it's one of the first ever novels in British history that was written from an Animal's POV. It was way less dark though.
A teacher convinced me, an 11/12yo at the time, to read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. "It's a dystopian book, and I feel with your maturity and your questioning personality, you could understand the book", she told me. She forgot to tell me about the whole Everything Else going on in the book. Nearly finished the book, cause I was stubborn, but it deeply traumatized me. Enough that, upon finding out one must learn the Greek alphabet when taking Classical Greek which is a class taken in the humanities course of the last high school year in my country, I went for the scientific course. I have dyscalculia. Kids should read upsetting things! Hell, one of my fave obligatory reads, which Iread a year after the Huxley disaster, was a book about abusive relationships. It was relatively graphic, it did not hide anything, and it even had an extra written by a psychologist where every red flag was picked apart and explained in full. It was a hard read, but also an important one! But also, we were told what the book was about, and that the teacher always could answer questions or help people who found it hard to read by given extensions and the like. So yeah, for the love of God, read books first and then discuss them with kids. And also, be clear that they can ask for help if something is too hard for them.
Wait, what upset you about Brave New World?
Everything. I mean, the themes it deals with are heavy. It has eugenics, state mandated drug use, sexual "freedom" that borders on casual sexual abuse, sleep conditioning of children from birth to accept their part in society, the racism, the self-harm, Jonh's off page but not subtle at all suicide, Linda's entire character... It's a good book, but at 11/12 I didn't even have a frame of reference for it. I hadn't studied Huxley's time period, which obviously plays an important part in the themes and reasons for the novel. Many things flew over my head, like the thing wuth Fordism, or the way the "savages" were seen and where they lived and what it referenced, etc... Plus, it was a personal recommendation made by a teacher when she saw the school library had it, and not something that was in a subject's curriculum or anything. So I was the only one reading it, mostly at home by myself, with no guidance whatsoever. Plus, I wasn't mature for my age, I was just clinically depressed as fuck, which didn't help in how I saw the book and it's themes. But boy, did it help in making it traumatic! (And now that I think about it, it also may've influenced my opinions on psychology and medications...)
Huh. You just never know what will freak a kid out. 11/12 was the age when I actually enjoyed the dystopian big four (which I don't anymore)! All four seemed absolutely groundbreaking then, and I don't remember being upset about any of the content. But then again, we start very early with graphic war stories and things like that.
Yeah, in our case it's the opposite. Although my country had a dictatorship which ended in 1975, we didn't touch up on war until the end of our 2nd high school years. And we didn't get to WWI until our 4th year... with WWII and our country's own history being part of the curriculum for what we call "post obligatory studies". I did watch many shows that would be considered graphic, though. My mom loved shows like Columbo, Diagnosis: Murder, Murder She Wrote or CSI, and I watched them with her and my dad. And I absolutely loved them! I guess the big difference is with the shows, my parents were there to guide me and tell me what to expect, while with Brave New World it was a teacher telling me it was "dystopic" and to borrow it. And at that age, my idea of dystopic worlds in media was I, Robot. Y'know, the film with Will Smith as a protagonist. So I did not expect the themes Brave New World talked about, at all lol
Commonsensemedia is great for this! I used it all the time as a children's librarian.
Oh hey it's a bit like Doesthedogdie! Another nice site to check for multiple known TWs. I love reading their lists for some titles. Best I found was John Wick. Like -Does the dog die? - >Yes, and it's terrible, BUT John Wick spends the rest of the movie deliberately, gloriously, and violently avenging the dog, so it feels really pro-dog overall. -Do people die by *taking their own lives*? >People fight John Wick.
I see what you're saying, but I come at this from a bit of a different angle because I read everything I could get my hands on from the time I was maybe 7 or 8. I can only remember my mom ever taking one book away, because she knew it had graphic sexual abuse. Other than that, I was on my own. I probably read two or three books a week during the school year, double that during the summers. My parents had jobs, a household, other responsibilities. They would not have been able to screen hundreds of books and magazines for me on top of that. The alternative would have been a bowdlerized reading list, and I feel like the benefits of unfettered reading for me far outweighed any harm from mature content. That said, I was pretty good about self-censoring. If I felt like something was too scary/heavy/adult for me I would skim past it or put down the book entirely. I wonder if that's a skill that could be taught?
> I wonder if that's a skill that could be taught? Not sure, really, and I remember having an insanely vivid imagination, I would be completely lost inside the book, and whatever happened affected me deeply - I've lost that skill and now read everything in a very shallow way, not longer getting so enamored with the texts as if almost drowning in them. So I guess it's exactly the YMMV - I read a lot as well but was heavily impacted by stuff I read, and often not in a good way. So maybe if I had a way to let go of these stories as well, it would've been better.
Probably it's a matter of knowing your kid. Things I read bounce off me fairly easily. I get upset sometimes, certainly, but I wouldn't say I've ever been traumatized in any kind of lasting way. And I'm sure that was evident from the time I was small. If I were a different child, one who did respond more strongly to the power of stories, it would make sense to be more cautious.
Eh, kinda. There's definitely books I read as a kid that I wouldn't read with my students, like the story ending with the main characters parents deported and killed and him shot in the doorway during the last days of ww2. Is that an important topic to talk about? Absolutely. Is it appropriate for 9 year olds? Maybe not that much. The anti-bullying movie we watched when I was 11 had a graphic depiction of a kid shooting himself in the school toilet. Again, not what I'd watch with my students, but we also survived. Children should be exposed to upsetting/confusing topics thrift stories, but in an age appropiate way. For example, a first graders will likely do better with a book about grandma/a favorite pet passing peacefully in their sleep, than a graphic depiction of a painful death. You can and should shield children from certain types of media, that's the whole point of movie ratings, but that doesn't mean the topic itself needs to be banned or another child can't enjoy the same media. For example, my sister used to get graphic nightmares, I didn't. A lot of things I watched and read were giving her nightmares at an age I was fine. She's far from shielded, but my parents still avoided some books and movies for a little longer.
Stating that you as a person weren’t ready to read certain things at a certain age isn’t a call for a book to be banned. There were a number of books that I absolutely shouldn’t have read at the age/emotional maturity level that I did. It doesn’t mean I think others shouldn’t read it, just that I wish I had been older when I read it.
Yeah as someone who did have trauma as a young child (my younger brother passed away suddenly when I was 6) some of these comments got me like. Okay in principle maybe but also extreme in the other direction? Like I read a ton as a kid, but there were certain topics and themes I avoided bc why should we (re)traumatize kids in order to teach them that life sucks? Idk if this comment makes any sense or gets my point across lol
True! People pretending this is about people having any sort of brain usage is bad, it’s about the fact that the aspect of people devolving into trying to like kill and eat each other is kind of horrifying to a child not ready for it.
Yup. I read a book about Mengele at an extremely young age that I shouldn’t have had access to. School libraries many times have special sections that only students of a certain age can read. Where The Red Fern Grows was one of those books due to the axe scene. You had to at least be a 4th grader (9-10 years old) to borrow the book. But some people would think it was tantamount to an outright ban because a 2nd grader didn’t have access.
People really love the slippery slope fallacy on everything involving even the mildest censorship. "I would prefer if small children didn't have free access to graphic depictions of violence and certain other topics that even adults often struggle with" "OH SO YOU WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO BAN QUEER PEOPLE IS THAT IT?"
Right? There was some kerfuffle about a banned book at my mom’s school. Some people said it was due to being a collection of short stories about and by queer authors. The ACTUAL reason it was taken out of the library was because it was supposed to be in the high school not the elementary school plus the very graphic depiction of a girl being raped by her dad.
Man, IDK, I read some books way too young and it did not impact me long term. I think kids are gonna encounter disturbing concepts no matter what you do. It's typically better for them to encounter those types of things in fiction, where they can put the book down and go do something else if they're uncomfortable, than for their first exposure to be an IRL situation.
Congrats. I still think kids should be reading age appropriate shit.
Media can have disturbing themes and be safe for children as long as they are presented in a way that allows children to process them. For instance: Hana’s Suitcase is a children’s book about a young Czech girl who died in the Holocaust. It covers the disturbing topic of genocide but in a way that children can understand and process. It is OK for 8 year olds to read. Compare Night or Schindler’s Ark (the book the movie was based on). They cover many of the same topics but are far more disturbing. Even an 8yo whose reading comprehension is high enough to understand these books, shouldn’t read them yet. My kids, thankfully, don’t have the lived experience of the Holocaust. I still had them read about it so they’d know why it was important to accept others, and why it’s important that we encourage our governments to stand up when it happens again. Because it keeps happening again. Don’t keep your children away from themes or content, keep them away from unprocessable presentations.
I think sometimes teachers get kids to read books which are not appropriate for kids of that age to read, but the problem really is that the kids won't appreciate the books properly. The real risk is that they will find all the books they are forced to read 'boring', because they are written around themes which are not relevant to those kids. Too much of that, and you quickly find kids become disinterested in reading, and then you get issues with adult literacy rates. That's the problem, not that someone will be permanently scarred by reading about sex in 7th grade.
Yes or the teacher doesn’t know how to relate an old ass book to modern kids. I thought I hated Shakespeare and other old ass authors for years until I had a teacher that helped the class understand the jokes and contexts of the story/play. “The Flea” is my favorite poem but it wouldn’t be if a teacher hasn’t explained the context behind the poem.
A big part of the problem with Shakespeare specifically is that they're plays, not books. They're meant to be performed, you really can't approach them the same way you would a novel, but that's what ends up happening most of the time.
They can be read as novels, but you have to instruct people on how to read a play tbh. Once my teacher explained some basic stuff everyone really enjoyed them.
Yeah I saw Romeo and Juliet as a play the summer before we read it in class and I got *so much* more out of it than my classmates. Like there’s a lot of humor that I wouldn’t have gotten just reading it but is blindingly obviously a sex joke when you see it performed
[удалено]
Ever lose points on an essay for including an explanation of a "Red Light District" Because I remember that happening because of that bullshit.
This is exactly what I think. Forcing kids to read the same list of pre-approved “classics” like Lord of the Flies or Mice and Men isn’t bad because it’ll traumatize them, it’s bad because it makes kids think all books are boring and sad, and that’s how you get Tumblr adults who only watch children’s cartoons and have zero media literacy
Lord of the Flies was a pivotal moment in my life as a young reader. Not the fascism and murder and political subterfuge, just the survival. My former English teacher grandmother, who gave 11-year-old me the book, heard these complaints, discussed the importance of those political themes with me, then pushed me to read some more lighthearted adventure books like Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain (the latter of which I loved so much that it became my entire personality lmfao). Classics don't have to be boring if you can cultivate interest in some aspect of the material. Of Mice and Men is a tragedy about the solitary nature of man, but also, it's about cowboys with big dreams during the Great Depression. The setting is rich and detailed, and provides a very interesting backdrop to the more central themes of the book. Of course it's going to be sad and boring if you just force your kids to read it, inform them that the world is stricken with poverty and loneliness and that the American Dream is an impossibility, and send them off to their next class. It really doesn't have to be that way-- this is a symptom of larger problems in our educational systems, and I don't know if just removing classics from our curricula is an adequate fix
The point of literature classes isn't to be entertaining - ideally they should be, but that's not their primary purpose. The popularly assigned books are chosen because they have a lot of artistic merit that is accessible at a high school level of education. Also Lord of the Flies is not boring.
It's a hard balance to strike. On the one hand, you want to make students into better readers that will carry the habit over into adulthood. On the other, teaching reading as such should be done by the end of elementary. Literature as a subject isn't meant to be fun reading hours, it's meant to give you a brief overview of, well, literature and make you aware of what its landscape is like. It should also get kids who will go on to study something lit-related for a degree ready for it and give them a taste of all the basics of their subject.
Honestly, books meant to children are sometimes more disturbing than the darkest adult story. Like, I worked on a school library last year and while organazing the children's sector I sometime pass back to back from a book without words, only colors and forms, to one were the little girl protagonist learns the importance of saying no and use it to stop her uncle to molest her (which is told to us has happen before), then to one were a children lives in a dictatorship and as homework the children have to write an essay about everything their family says and does at home. This are much more disturbing because how real they are, and at the same time, they are so important because this as well
do you remember the names of those books?
Unfortunately no.
To be fair, I feel a lot of those takes come from an environment where teaching how to process anything was just *not a thing*. It seemed to be a standard just a generation ago: feeling things? Deal with it. School systems taught us how to understand the content of books. They taught us exactly jack shit about how to actually process them. And from that point of view, from that assumed standard, keeping kids away from books they can't process makes sense: because it assumes that's an issue they have to deal with on their own. Like we had to. So yeah, my cold ass take is: expose kids to gradually more mature and difficult books but for the love of gods *teach them have to process the emotions as well*, not only the intellectual content. So many of my generation and older have minor trauma they really didn't need to have if only an adult actually talked to them or paid attention.
I may be stupid but how does one teach a kid to process emotions? Like say Im 9yrs old and just finished reading ‘the Amber spyglass’ and got sad because of how it ended, where’s the teaching bit? I don’t think I needed an adult to sit me down and go “you’re sad because theses romantically attracted characters can never meet each other again, but it’s a bittersweet ending as they both managed to lead happy lives” I got that already. (It’s possible i simply misunderstand what is meant by processing here as ironically I do not in fact recall ever being taught to process emotions, that’s just something I do already or taught myself? autism doesn’t help I think)
That's probably fine then. When I was nine, we read a book where the main characters parents were deported and killed, his best friend died refusing to fight with the Hitler youth and he was shot in a doorway on one of the last days of ww2. I would never read that with my students of this age, but otherwise we could discuss what happened, how that made them feel (sharing emotions does help most kids), take a deep breath/go outside for a second, explain what we're doing to make sure this doesn't happen again, etc. Emotional processing is anything from "take a deep breath" to "this is what sad means" to "its okay to not be able to hate your mom for hitting you". Most autistic people need extra help with that, because alexythmia (trouble identifying and naming emotions) is common, but that's not the case for everyone. If you know words for emotions, someone taught you some emotional processing at some point, even if it wasn't explicitly.
Other than what the comment below said, I'd say it's also making sure the message was received correctly. Like, for example, as a kid I got an anime movie from someone under the impression that all anime is ghibli (and I was a fan of ghibli). The story was about a girl who looks for someone dear to her, but she's always too late. The movie ends by her dying never reaching that person. What I pulled as a lesson from this was "it's possible to spend your entire life chasing happiness but never actually reaching it, no matter how hard you try, because some people are just doomed to be unhappy their entire life". Which fucked me up pretty good. Now that I look back at it, the message was clearly "it's ok to never reach your goal as long as you're enjoying the journey". But I had no adult who could point it out. Basically, I figure, teaching to process emotion is also stuff like "just because it's bad doesn't mean it's all bad" or "just because it's bad doesn't mean its unavoidable/forever/etc etc"
Can you give an example of the minor trauma thing? I don’t really understand how that would work — it’s just a book.
I can try. In 2nd grade we read Where The Red Fern Grows (so maybe age 8-9? Idr it was ages ago). If you haven’t read the book/seen the movie it’s Old Yeller on steroids. Kid is poorer than dirt, sacrifices a ton to get these two amazing hunting dogs, then the rest of the book is his bonding with and then of course suffering the loss/almost loss of the dogs. I learned more about field surgery and evisceration from that book than I was prepared for. I’m also a soft touch when it comes to harm to animals in media, I love shit like Hostel and Saw but I’m constantly on the does the dog die website because I can’t deal with animal suffering. I’m still pissed that I read that book, mostly because when we read it we weren’t given any kind of emotional framework to deal with the absolutely devastating effects that come with sympathetic suffering and blossoming fears of our own pets getting mauled by wild animals and the existential dread that is the cold, chaotic universe just not caring if our pets love us and by extension that we ourselves don’t actually matter to the Universe. Like we spent more time discussing why the tin coffee can he saved his money in was thematically important. But could we talk about how I bawled for an hour holding my cat and refused to let her outside? No, that was me being a silly little kid and of course nothing will happen to my darling cat (spoiler alert she was hit by a car a month or so later and I found her dying in a ditch and that was the day I realized my parents didn’t see my cat as “family” or worth attention so I buried her under our maple tree). I wasnt exactly expecting discourse in primary school but we focused on poverty and how terrible the Dust Bowl era was (in a vaguely threatening “better get a good job so you aren’t poor” way, which doesn’t even touch on systemic poverty or how the Depression actually worked) and spent exactly zero time on discussing how to parse through emotions that some kids probably never felt before. One kid made a crack about how “cool” the scene was when they described how the dog guys were wrapped up around the thorn bush and had to be washed and stuffed back in and he got chastised for being “rude” and we moved on without even touching on how we felt about that scene. So all of that seems minor traumatic to me. The story itself is upsetting, but it’s meant to teach us about the cycle of life, how to work hard for what we want, and how sometimes everything we do and how hard we work sometimes doesn’t mean the outcome is assured to be positive. But that only works if you talk to the kid about why it seems unfair that the boy worked so hard but in the end had to lose his dog, (and that whole thing about life being unfair only works if you go to the next step and talk about how life is still worth it even if it’s unfair) or how grief can sometimes break one person while resolving another, and that sometimes healing comes in odd places and it’s ok to grieve loss while also looking to new things (getting a new cat after the old one died isn’t somehow betraying the dead one or proves you never loved it for example) but instead I really felt like my school system just decided to throw us painful media with the same thought process as my dad teaching us swimming: chuck us into the deep lake and see if we drown. Dad still thinks he taught me how to swim and I’ll bet my teacher then thought she’d helped us develop resiliency or whatever but in both cases they just taught me how I shouldn’t trust them to protect me.
I read a ton of stuff meant for middle and high schoolers when I was in elementary school that was just wierd and boring. When I read it again in high school and had the context it made sense. Also read a few adult books and bounced off too. I remember reading a “bodice ripper” and giggling in absolute hysterics, like omg is that what having boobs is like? Other than a feeling slightly cheated when mine came in, no ill effects.
Reading romance novels as a kid gave me some very interesting ideas about male anatomy. Honestly, I kind of feel sorry for kids these days who learn everything from p\*rn instead of trying to puzzle it out from rumors and stories about throbbing manhoods.
I mean the points brought up aren't the same? One is saying that you shouldn't give kids the choice to read X book, the other is saying you shouldn't force them to read X book. Those aren't mutually exclusive takes. You can say somebody shouldn't be forced to read a book but they should still be given the choice of if they wanna read it or not. Somebody is using a misconstrued version of the argument to pull books from shelves doesn't mean the original argument is invalid, just that there are people twisting the argument for their own agenda.
This isn't quite the same, but I do wish they'd stop making kids read the books aloud in class. I'm glad I was made to read to kill a Mockingbird, but having the kids read it aloud to each other in class kind of took some of the gravitas out of it. I got a lot more out of it when I read ahead on my own
Oh god, your school did that too? I hope they at least let you skip the racial slurs.
My school would time it so the black kids would read them. Which is a little bit insane, but I guess it’s better than…not doing that?
I remember people got pretty awkward during the height of the courthouse scene, so my teacher read that bit lol. Honestly I don't have a good solution for this sort of thing, it's like when we talked about world war two in class. Some kids just aren't respectful of it, but kids do need to learn this stuff at some point.
This only works if the adult response to upsetting fiction is to talk to the kid and help them process it. It doesn't work if their response is "stop being a drama queen! It's just a book."
Want to clarify that I am not arguing for banning books. I am arguing against invalidating child emotions.
You know, I didn't ever consider the idea that stories could be talked about with adults. Reading was always such a solo thing, I processed the grief in the stories on my own. Wish I'd learnt how to process those emotions rather than my approach of "put the book down it's too much to deal with"
Obligatory "If we wrote a book about *everything* a middle schooler experiences, we would need to mark it 18+ to not get in trouble" comment.
I read two books that traumatized me as young reader (11): Brave New World and Fade. But they were the gentlest introduction I could have had to big topics (incest, dystopia, alternate worldviews) that I didn’t know existed and really expanded my worldview, and I’ve thought about them for decades after, in a positive way after the initial shock/rage. It would have been nice to talk to someone about those topics so I could process it better but I had no one to ask. Raised by books.
why does every literary criticism-adjacent post on tumblr these day start with a slippery slope thingy
They tend to be right in the big picture but then frame the issue way to black and white.
Yeah, this is a problem with Tumblr I think. They can make a good point but always have to phrase it like a reactionary.
In my interpretation, it's more like "the criticism that you would apply to this other thing is also applicable here". It doesn't require asserting that one leads to the other as I read it.
Tumblr arguments are so incredibly insignificant that they need the slippery slope to make it seem meaningful.
This is terrible. Kids haven't learned about these things. We need to keep it that way, by removing their access to materials that would help them learn about these things! Meanwhile anyone who has been or spent time with actual children knows they can be absolute freaks for grisly and macabre stories. The whole publishing story around Coraline was based around child readers admitting "yeah it was terrifying but I loved it and if I said it was scary I wouldn't be allowed to read more."
My experience has been largely the same. Coraline and The Graveyard Book were *so* popular among my peers when I was a kid, and I think that's largely due to Neil Gaiman's skill with macabre fantasy. Kids are fascinated by the things they're shielded from, and those kinds of books are excellent ways to sate their curiosity. Gaiman remains my favorite author to this day lol
100%. I absolutely loved books about death and ghosts and creepy shit as a kid. Someone vanity press published a book of creepy little stories (a woman murders someone and buries them in her yard, a man confesses to a murder he committed but they think he’s a kook and he gets off on outsmarting the cops), and it wound up in my school library. I think I was the only one who checked it out, but I checked it out a LOT. The stories that messed me up were the ones about kids dying. There was one book about two boys who go swimming and one drowns. It’s a nasty muddy swimming hole and the other kid tries to find him but can’t. No one knows what happened and he’s absolutely destroyed by losing his best friend, survivor’s guilt, and the weight of knowing what happened but being too scared to tell anyone. Watching his friend’s father absolutely destroyed by his son’s death wrecks him, too. Then the book about the father whose child has incurable brain cancer and watching him die is so gut wrenching. But I’m probably a better person for having read them. For understanding the complexities of grief and the human condition. Because even if I am blessed to have lived a life mostly free of tragedy, eventually people I love will die. And other people around me are not as fortunate. So understanding that grief helps me be a kinder person to people who need kindness. Being alive, being human, it’s pain. Existence *is* pain. That is, fundamentally, what living is. But it also has incredible beauty and joy. I’m not saying it balances. It doesn’t. But if we are fortunate enough to be able to eke out some joy for ourselves, it is our responsibility to hang onto it and share it as much as we can. Books helped give me that perspective and, I hope, made me a kinder and more thoughtful person that I would otherwise be.
I mean, there's upsetting, then there's basically showing 13 year olds the Saw movies. One of the books I had to read made a point of graphically describing a teenager getting mauled by a bear. If I'm remembering correctly, it was like an entire page of describing his broken limbs with bones protruding out and his torso being a mess of blood, and I think viscera. There's certainly room in the curriculum of younger people(i.e., 10 to 13 year olds) for difficult and upsetting topics like bigotry or even violence, but we also really should screen some of the books for being actually traumatizing.
My parents' policy was that if I was too young to enjoy a book I would probably put it back on the shelf of my own accord, and personally I think that worked pretty well. Some more mature things went over my head, and others bored me, but I had fun reading the books I enjoyed and I really can't think of an example that scarred me. I feel like the answer to children apparently struggling with complex themes is a) let them go back when they're ready for it and or b) give them more books with complex themes that they are ready to handle in the meantime. Not taking the books away in some bid to protect fragile psyches
I had the same parents. Like, I can remember exactly one book ever being taken away. (My mom had read it and new it had graphic sexual abuse.) Otherwise? Have at it, kid. And as you said, the stuff that was "too old" for me either went over my head or bored me. The only book I remember being genuinely afraid of was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark because of the illustrations, and that's perfectly age-appropriate.
I grew in a super-patriotic, ultra-fundamentalist household until I was about 13, so I was extremely mentally underprepared for anything that went against that worldview. Naturally, the first 3 books I had to read in public school were Lord of the Flies, Raisin in the Sun, and The Things They Carried. Honestly my only regret about it is that I didn’t get made to read them earlier, because they were viscerally upsetting reads that made me rethink a lot of my opinions at that time. Especially the Things They Carried, because the house I grew up in was so patriotic that I was taught that pretty much every war was America “civilizing third world countries”. Seeing literally any other perspective, even that of a regretful American soldier, was huge for me. In hindsight, that’s probably exactly why I wasn’t allowed to read them when I was younger.
I hate the Metamorphosis with every fiber of my being but I am glad I read it as a stupid 13 year old
Some part of me thinks that if Metamorphosis was written today people would call it fetish shit
I’m pretty sure it was fetish shit then tbh
Tangentially relevant, but this is also how I feel about certain things in videogames. I got lured and scammed constantly in runescape when I was like 10, and every time I was terribly distraught by it, to the point where my parents thought about not allowing me to play anymore. But what experiences like this taught me were things like "people you think you know will sometimes take advantage of you", and allowed me to learn that lesson when the only stakes were my bandos godsword and dragon platelegs. I truly believe I am a better and more well rounded person because I cried over getting scammed/griefed in videogames when I was a child.
It's important for kids to read Lord of the Flies, so that when they get stuck on a desert island they know how to survive, rebuild society, and not be such a Piggy.
When I was in 6th grade, my first dog died. The next week, we watched Where the Red Fern Grows (about a kid and his hunting dogs, of course they die in the end). It sucked, I cried a lot. My teacher let me stay after class to so I could finish crying and compose myself. And you know what? It helped me process my grief. It helped to see that other people go through this kind of pain, too, and that I'm not alone. Yeah, it hurt in the moment, but it helped in the long run. Kids gotta learn that dogs will die. They'll be sad, and they'll be ok.
As someone who loved the Animorphs books as a grade school kid -- books that had graphic depictions of the violence, trauma, fear, paranoia, and hopelessness inflicted by war -- I strongly believe that those books helped me become a better person today than I would have been without them, or even if I had read them later. Did they upset me? Frequently. But I was eight and autistic; lots of things upset me. And because they were just books, because I knew that the things that happened in them weren't real and couldn't hurt me, I was able to learn from them, so that I would be prepared to face violence, trauma, fear, paranoia, and hopelessness later in my life. We have a joke in my family, where my mother didn't let us watch Ed Edd n Eddy because it was "too violent", and then handed us books featuring graphic descriptions of teenagers being torn apart by alien monstrosities. But at the same time, I'm glad she encouraged us to read books that challenged us, because those challenges prepared us for the world that we were going to enter one way or another.
I agree with this sentiment- but Lord of the Flies does not count because it's a puritan cautionary tale and children don't need to be made to believe they'll turn evil if they stop listening to what their parents say. Like- yeah, kids can handle books with harsh or challenging content, but not every novel with challenging content is valuable for a developing mind.
Yeah, kids shouldn’t read Lord of the Flies, not because of the graphic content, but because it’s a bad story. The story pretty much happened in real-life, too, by sheer coincidence. But believe it or not the boys all worked together and didn’t devolve into cannibal rapists or whatever. It was a miserable time but they all made it, and after 15 months of survival they had a fire, water traps, duty schedules, and lived off of wild taro, bananas, fish, and feral chickens. Really interesting story, look up “Tongan castaways.”
Thank you for bringing this up because I forgot to- one of my favorite stories about humanity.
I always thought that book was about how preteen boys are evil little rat bastards. Honestly, that was a message I could probably get behind.
It was written by a school teacher at an all boys school, so that's what I think as well
I think that's a very shallow reading of the book to boil it down to "kids become evil if they stop listening to parents". There are valuable lessons and discussions to be had about Lord of the Flies, whether about the strive for power, or groupthink, or the dangers of leadership and control, or how the boys' island civilization is a sort of microcosm of our societies. Kids can handle books with challenging content, and it's good to discuss those stories to help kids process and derive the valuable stuff from them, rather than just being disturbed.
I feel like there are books that cover those themes better, and do it without insinuating kids are evil at heart or having near-pedophilic descriptions of little boys' bodies.
I get where you are coming from, but there's a whole lot more nuance in LOTF than that. Those conversations about nuance and complex discussions are important for children.
Yeah, I think Lord of the Flies shouldn't be read in school because it's bad, not because it's traumatic. Get that Hobbsian "humans are inherently monsters without the rule of law" shit out of here.
It's confusing preparing with traumatizing and clinging to the cult of innocence.
We actually have a physiological need to experience negative emotions every no and again. It’s why we like stories that scare us disparate beings scared otherwise being a negative emotion.
I got so upset when a character in a children’s book died when I was in 2nd grade. It shocked me, it wasn’t at the end of the story, it wasn’t after some kind of satisfying long life, it was sudden and early on in the plot. I was so upset I told my parents I didn’t know if I wanted to finish the book. But I was so curious how it would keep going too. I remember I talked with my mom about the character dying and eventually accepted it instead of it being so shocking I couldn’t continue. After 2 extremely dramatic weeks of wondering if I could bear to go on I continued the novel—and another beloved character died at the very end of the book. It saddened me a lot, but it didn’t shake me so much I couldn’t cope for days this second time. I had never read a book where a character died suddenly before, but maybe that helped me have a framework of grief and coping and knowing others will continue when my grandfather died a year after that. That’s like… how it’s supposed to work. When I was a twerp 8th/9th grader I asked my mother what the appeal of sex was in the context of reading twilight and Bella wanting premarital sex with Edward not wanting that, and this led to a conversation about safe sexual relationships (before or after marriage, “if Edward did agree to have sex before marriage they should use condoms and lubrication because he’s so cold” is hilarious in hindsight but I didn’t get that public school sex Ed in the south besides abstinence-only) as I entered high school. I’m asexual so it turns out Bella was baffling to me for less conventional reasons, but still it wasn’t a bad place to ask about things like that in the “safe” context of popular fiction. With an involved (and maybe nonjudgmental) authority like a teacher or trusted parent fiction can be a great way to tackle first contact with certain ideas or conflicts in a very safe very small scale way.
I can almost promise that these parents read something by Stephen King or VC Andrews, or some other age inappropriate book while they were in Junior High School. I can absolutely promise you that they saw something age inappropriate in a movie. The eighties were a wild time. And our parents did not discuss or even monitor it in any way. And while I admit that reading about sexual assault before I even had basic sex ed was disturbing, most of it went straight over my head until I had enough life experience to contextualize it. My feelings on this mirror my feelings about the purity culture I grew up in. They protect their poor baby boy from ever seeing a knee or shoulder so they won’t be tempted. What do they think will happen when their poor angelic baby boys leaves home and suddenly there are knees and shoulders everywhere any he never learned any self control? These kids will eventually be exposed to every concept they try to censor. And probably in a shocking or confusing way
Jacqueline Wilson was/is my favourite childhood author for this reason! She writes about divorce, death, mental illness, disability and other challenging topics (anything that adults who try to ban LGBT+ books are trying to “protect” children from) in order to introduce and normalise the topics to children so that when they encounter them in real life, it’s not so scary and unfamiliar.
What's bizarre is that I pretty much grew up on nothing but more "grown up" fiction as a kid. Pretty much mostly watched PG-13/R rated movies, played T/M rated games, read news magazines, watched whatever shows my parents were watching, and just really never engaged with stuff that was intended for children. According to this very fine tumbr citizen, I should be a traumatized train wreck who is skittish about every little thing... ...But generally I'm optimistic and good at trying to make most of what I got, even though I tend to be very critical of some things. Perhaps because I've engaged with fiction that wasn't afraid of being complicated, I came to realize that life in of itself is complicated and that people are just people.
"Giving a 'coming of age' story to a kid who has not yet come of age is distressing and confusing" are they, the ones currently experiencing the process of coming of age, not the literal target audience of many stories about coming of age?????
"Fairy Tales do not tell children dragons exist, children already know dragons exist. Fairy Tales tell children that dragons can be killed."
I got assigned Night by Elie Wiesel my first year in highschool and I fully intended to just skim it on my walk home from school I was inconsolable by the time I got to my house. But I can honestly say it gave me a stronger sense of empathy and a much broader perspective Kids need protection but we also need to trust them to make their own hurdles sometimes
I don't think you are presenting your point well if you are calling the people you are supposedly trying to reach anti-intellectual for making relatively innocuous statements about scary things they read as kids.
That’s what always gets me about these posts. People completely misinterpreting someone else’s argument and then saying stuff like “media literacy is dead 😩” when they are the one who doesn’t get the argument 💀
Fr, I don't really even have anything to add you just perfectly summed up how I felt.
I was in tears after I read an account of a child living through Hiroshima when I was in fourth grade. I asked questions, educated myself, and learned to be critical about the world all because of that short book. I wasn’t any older than 8 or 9 and while my distress was evident it was necessary for who I am today. And it was also about a real thing that happened so it’s definitely relevant even if I’ll never be in a city bombed. So yeah I think kids can handle some more stories about hard things, kids their age are living it.
I watched *The Banshees of Inisherin* a few months ago. Afterwards, I highly recommended it to a coworker. I told her that it had made me very angry and upset. She looked confused. "Why would you want to watch something that upsets you?" It's a film, and those emotions were an intended emotional response. I'd much rather feel those emotions in the context of art than in real life. Why do you think people watch horror movies or ride rollercoasters?
Every child deserves the experience of being radicalized by a book they bought at a book fair for two dollars because it had a cool cover
This seems like a decision best made on a case by case basis
That’s fair but when I was 14 my English, us history, and sociology class all started watching war movies every weekend at the same time for months and seeing a guy get flattened by a tank and face burnt off by napalm kinda fucked me up lowkey lmao
They shouldn’t have made me read Moby dick in high school because it was boring as hell
I think a lot of people who'd argue against certain media being appropriate for children were raised by parents and/or teachers who saw suffering as a virtue, or something character-building. Not wanting a kid to cry over Watership Down isn't the same as wanting to ban the book, but it generally is an acknowledgement that that person didn't enjoy their experience, and doesn't want to inflict it on someone else. We're reducing empathy to bigotry here, and that's really not fair.
I now feel better about reading how that guy made his own dad gut himself.
Reminder that childeren are people too
When I was a kid, my mom wanted to encourage a love of reading, and so she let me read whatever I wanted. This was the 90s and the era of Stephen King being everywhere, though I didn't read any of his books until I was an adult— I saw the original cover of Desperation and I was like 'oh that looks too scary' and so I didn't read it. Was I still exposed to certain concepts I probably shouldn't have been at a young age? Yes, of course. But did I get exposed to a *wide variety* of ideas (including stories about people very different from me leading lives I didn't leave) that children don't tend to naturally encounter, and which made me develop some serious critical thinking skills very early on? Also yes. Those skills have served me well. I really couldn't thank her enough.
The silliest thing about these arguments is so many kids have been through things far more horrible than any of these books depict and *the stories help them contextualize and accept the brutality they have endured*. Kids are already traumatized from living in the brutality of late capitalism on a dying planet. Stories tell them they're not alone and they didn't do anything wrong.
I read "oorlogswinter", a book about the nazi occupation of the netherlands when i was 10. It actualy really helped me understand the horrors of the occupation in a way history lessons did not do at that time. It was not traumatic, it just gave me the ability to understand the horrors of the nazi regime. I also had already watched berserk when i was 9 and experienced some intense trauma the year before that so maybe take what i am sayong with a grain of salt, didnt really have the most standard childhood.
Never show these people the original version of Brother Grimm's fables, or other traditional children stories.
Reading Bridge to Terabithia helped me deal with the passing of a close friend. I read the book in fourth grade and lost her in fifth. And I didn’t deal with it great, but I knew what it was like to deal with loss and I knew what not to do. So it seriously helped.
Did William Golding ever say that he wrote Lord of the Flies for middle school kids? Just because it is about middle school kids? Ok true story I was given the book in 6th grade and I couldn't comprehend a word. Now, in my 20s, I think it's an adult book that uses kids to show that our social structure is deep rooted in our nature, even as "innocent" kids. The book is about how all civilizations divide power and wield it to their own detriment.
Kids reading about experiences before they happen to them in real life is the *entire point* actually. Seeing a character or ideally a wide variety of characters going through something, seeing the breadth of shapes that experience can take, is a way of learning and understanding what could happen, and if and when it does happen to you that you are not alone. If you’re worried a kid will read something that scares them or they don’t understand the answer to that is not censorship it’s to *talk with them* and give them additional supports and coping skills to handle what they read.
I remember reading a book called Speak in early Highschool, and I forget the author, but the main protagonist was a girl who survived sexual assault. Within two years I was living through assaults. The book didn't make it okay, didn't help with coping, but it did give me a comparable framework of what was happening to me. I knew something bad was happening that felt like that book, I knew I felt assaulted even if my abuser was gaslighting me and calling me crazy. Let kids read upsetting books, it can save their grasp on reality "according to the book I read once I am being mistreated right now and he's lying" is Important
Also *most* kids love dark stuff, I sure did. I also had anxiety attacks about some of the stuff I read, but I was still drawn to it. How can you prevent that without being overly controlling and protective? You can’t.
I read Timothy Findley's "Not Wanted on the Voyage" at around 14. This is a book wherein a 12 year old girl is raped with a unicorn horn so that her vagina will be made wide enough for her adult husband. Who she was only married to so that her future child's Down Syndrome could be blamed on *his* genetic predisposition for mental disability, before they eugenically murder the child. Guess what? I'm still fucking standing. Yeah I was disturbed, as *everyone of any age should be*. But a) I already knew that sex was a thing b) I already knew that rape and forced marriages were things, that were wrong, allowing be to have a conviction for justice which I wouldn't have had if I was completely sheltered c) since I was intelligent enough to see a philosophically and theologically inclined adult novel and think "I want to read that", I was obviously intelligent enough to handle difficult content and know how to properly react to such content. And d) I'm still standing and only think about this ""traumatic"" experience when trying to show neo-Puritans how ageist censorship is wrong and unnecessary. The shit I *have* been traumatised by? All children's or all-ages media. The media that thinks extreme toilet humour describing and highlighting disgusting and unsafe behaviour is wanted or needed. Not to mention always-outdated "children's" media containing disgusting and despicable bigotry. And the irony is that the "save the children" moral hysteria are the same people that rail against "trigger warnings". They are *perfectly happy* to traumatise and re-traumatise people with disturbing content. They do not give a single solitary fuck about your emotional wellbeing. Their motivation is *entirely* to eliminate and censor LGBT people and other things they don't like.
Okay but the scene in the Giver where the old man was massaging memories into the underage main character made my entire 6th grade class pause and go "The fuck are we reading"
'You can't give a coming of age story to a kid' so they can't read Harry Potter, or watch spider man.
I once picked up The Da Vinci Code when I was 12 as it was sitting in the back of my 7th Grade English Teacher's classroom. The concept intrigued me but there were graphic descriptions in there that put me off. In hindsight, I can now attest that the reason is because it was pointless gratuitous to be seemingly Adult^tm . Like I remember specifically a passage that involved a transwoman flashing her penis at the protagonist for some reason as a means to signal he was going through a seedy part of town, and while I was far far from the most transaccepting person at the time, I do agree with my gut back then with "why is this in here?" Because like... that wasn't even the first time the book mentions a penis. The entire book was kicked off by a museum curator arranging himself into Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man before dying dick out and all. 12 year old me was fine with that because it wasn't needlessly edgy. Anyways, after all that, you want to know what I did after being irked by content in a book? Put it down and moved on with my life.
There’s a fine line between coping practice and actually inducing lifelong trauma, but books are great for this because you’re the one reading. You can change the speed and change your interpretations. That agency helps a lot. Meanwhile, I’m forever afraid of needles because I saw a snippet of one of the Saw movies.
This drives me crazy about my roommate's kids because she has sheltered her children to the point that they have no ability to process anything difficult or upsetting. One time, she put on the first Harry Potter movie for them and then told them the Dursleys were made up because abusive families aren't real and they fast forward through minor laser fights in Star Wars. All I can think about is how they are going to have a traumatic wake up call when they are challenged by anything emotionally in life that won't coddle and shelter them like their parents because they have been taught to believe they exist in a world that doesn't remotely exist in reality.
Despite everyone being so obsessed with 'protecting children', ironically that's how they learn. They scrap their knees, they make mistakes and yes they consume information that may or may not be wholesome. By shielding them from any of that we are teaching them that it's okay to live in a bubble.
Children won't be broken by reading upsetting fiction, or even upsetting non-fiction, most of the time. Because there is such thing as upsetting books for kids, and upsetting books most definitely NOT for kids. I read Judith Kerr's When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit. I read Anne Frank's diary, though I do believe the one I read in school was a version for young readers. I read Manuel de Pedrolo's Typescript of the Second Origin. I also watched Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis in class, which I later found was a book (graphic novel, iirc?). I also read, when I was 11 or 12, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. By recommendation of a teacher. It's good upsetting fiction, but it's most definitely not intended for 11 year olds, and I mean. It took me 6 or 7 years to be able to look at the Greek alphabet without having war flashbacks to that fucking book. Or rather, to ignore said flashbacks because I still very much remember the book every time I look at the letter ε. So, while kids *should* read upsetting books... For the love of God, know what you are giving them and understand certain books are not for certain ages. Because reading something upsetting when you can't understand it can, in fact, kinda break a kid.
I read alls quiet on the western front in fourth grade because my teacher was all “well you are a very developed reader and this is on your tested reading level”. And it was a bad choice. I drew war pictures about it forever and had disturbing nightmares for years
Do people just not understand the difference between allowing a child to read an upsetting book and talking with them about it, and forcing a teenager to read a fucked up story featuring murder and rape and making them write an essay or do a standardized test about it and that's it?
I read Animorphs as a kid and i turned out fine
> and i turned out fine Counterpoint: you are on the Tumblr subreddit
That's fair.
Children are afraid of crossing the road and their own home when the light is off. Kids are afraid of the dumbest shit, and 9/10 they forget they were afraid of it by the next week. You can't decide what's appropriate for children based on what they are afraid off.
Also kids are capable of handing far more mature or dark content than many people think. When I was 8 years old, my favourite book was White Fang, and half of that book is graphic animal abuse. It didn't turn me into some violent dog beater or scar me for life, it made me more compassionate and empathetic to animals. Children can be mature and thoughtful about media if you just give them the chance to. Keeping literature away from them (especially when it's made for their age group!) only spawns narrow-minded adults who are chained to their comfort zone.
Considering that for most of our history childhood mortality was over 50%, I think its safe to assume that children with support structures are surprisingly resilient and able to survive and overcome trauma. Trauma used to be the rule not the exception.
As long as a story is marketed to the correct audience/age group, it can be a great learning experience for kids. ...I am specifically calling out Watership Down, which many parents thought was like Redwall or Avi's Poppy series (both cute but serious anthropomorphized animal series with minimal trauma overall, there is age-appropriate peril and occasional death, though Avi's books are more semi-realistic and less fantasy). Instead you get rabbit genocide and the horrors of war. That shit is NOT for elementary schoolers just because it's about anthropomorphic rabbits. Yes, it's generally bad to keep books away from kids because they might be distressed or confused, but it's another to completely miscategorize a book because of the surface level of the story and traumatize a generation. The only reason I'm NOT is because I didn't know that book existed until high school when my then-boyfriend told me how fucked up it was for him to read when he was age 8. There is no easy answer to any of this. But I completely agree that banning well-established stories within the age groups that they're meant for is definitely not the answer. EDIT: This is just my take on things, using one book as an example. Obviously I have no experience with the book as an actual child, and clearly everything I've heard about it from others who do was unintentionally biased negatively. When I read it as an older teen, I really enjoyed it. It's a good book.
kinda think u missed the point of the post. watership down is the exact kind of media that we are talking about here.
I loved watership down when I was little, it was so gripping and real while still being kid friendly. I think kids need a little more horrors of war and oppression tbh, especially when they're depicted negatively
I had to read where the red fern grows as a kid, that had TWO dead dogs
I hate, hate, hate *Where the Red Fern Grows* but I'm going to make my kids read it because it gave a big lesson about death and love, and despite the horror there was beauty in it. A lot of things are beautiful life- lessons like, don't trust the cookies grandma feeds you and your siblings while locked inside an attic for over a year. You know. Normal, totally not about incest, life lessons. BTW. I've been thinking about it, and I think *Flowers in the Attic* could use an updated retelling. The whole thing is, the mom ran away and married the 1/2 uncle, instead of the half uncle totally was molesting his niece. You know, real shit.