When I was reading the article about the Amish family for this week’s readings, I was very interested in the length the mother went to in order to find appropriate reading material for her children. She would only buy books from certain trusted stores and if she saw books anywhere else she would research them before bringing them into her house. And since reading is primarily a communal thing in their family, it is easy for the parents to control what their children read.
In my house, reading was primarily a private thing. Reading was what you did when you didn’t want to see or talk to other people. Reading was for alone time. I have an older brother so we had books in my house that were for kids a little older than me. If had run out of things to read I would go and look at our book shelf which had my books, my brother’s books and my dad’s books all mixed together. Only one time did my mother tell me that I wasn’t allowed to read a book, but it was too easy to sneak it so I read it anyway. I hadn’t been allowed to read it because it was about a high school freshman boy and his girlfriend and basically their budding sexuality. I was in about third or fourth grade and just thought the whole thing was weird. My mom found the book hidden under my bed but laughed instead of punishing me.
My experience with parental guidance from reading was the total opposite of this Amish family’s. There were all sorts of books in my house and once I started reading by myself pretty much anything was fair game whether my parents knew it or not. Because of this I was definitely exposed to things earlier than a lot of my friends who didn’t read as much as I did, some of which was good and some of which was bad. Do any of you guys have memories about being told not to read something or having your parents discouraging you from reading things that were meant for older kids? I’m thinking about at what point reading at the highest reading level is good and at what point parents really do need to be careful about what their kids read.
I think my answer to that question is both yes and no. My parents never really tried to censor my literary development on fear of ideological lines. I am a relatively agnostic person, for example, and my mother is a pretty staunch Catholic. But when I began dipping into the Christopher Hitchens or the Richard Dawkins (both notoriously offensive atheists) my mother was simply glad to see that I was forming my own opinions and nurturing my intelligence.
However, there was definitely a sort of “literary elitism”, for lack of better term, in my household. The bar was set pretty high for me as far as reading was concerned which may explain why it was harder for me to ease into it until later in life when I was more competent at understanding such things. I guess literary censorship can exist in many forms but in general I think it is pretty negative for all of the parties involved.
I have somewhat of a mixed perspective on this, being the child of divorced parents, with one step-parent. I am also very anti-censorship when it comes to reading and watching television, so I’ll try to avoid the inevitable soapbox.
As a child, I felt as though most of my education came from reading and television. I had a pass at the school library that allowed me to read books at any level, which helped when there were topics I didn’t understand, but wanted to research. It also led me to become incredibly independent. Kids are naturally drawn to what they couldn’t have. I was never barred from reading Stephen King or Dawkins, so I never felt pushed towards anything in particular.
However, my father later remarried into an incredibly religious family that has very few problems with censorship. It was incredibly jarring to be told, as a teenager, that I shouldn’t be reading or watching the same material I had been consuming for years. That was the point where I felt drawn to those books. In the case of my eight-year-old brother, his reading is about as regulated as a Soviet Russian newspaper. No Spongebob, Phineas and Ferb, Frozen, or Harry Potter. The list of restricted evils covers magic, back-talk, liberalism, violence, and beliefs from other religions (including stories from Greek myth).
I feel as though my brother lacks a certain type of education because of the censorship. I found that reading books ‘above’ my age level helped me to understand other people, especially adults. While some issues were a little tough for me, it felt better to be aware of it. For example, I learned what abortion was in fifth grade after reading the Stephen King novel “Insomnia.” It did not make me a prostitute, heathen, or back-alley abortionist. It did, however, open me up to the debate, and give me a better understanding of radicalism in politics. It is important to soak up as much information as possible at as young an age as possible. Memory only gets worse with time, and there’s the rest of a lifetime to sort through it all.
Censoring what a person reads, I believe, is putting a crutch and a limit on their development. It makes them dependent on someone else to tell them what is or is not appropriate. I will concede that intense violence and graphic sexuality are reasonable in some cases, but I think hiding different viewpoints is almost admitting any personal beliefs are wrong, since they won’t stand up to criticism. Reading taught me how to defend what I believe, and it has made me confident enough to change my beliefs when they don’t hold up against criticism.
I tried to avoid the soapbox, but I went there anyway. My apologies.
My home life in regard to reading was very similar to yours. On very rare occasions would my mom tell me that I couldn’t read something from the shelf or whatever book I picked up at the library that week. I do recall one instance when she told me I couldn’t read a book and it was in the summer as I was going into my last year of high school – sadly I forget the name of the book. What I did to get around this was rent it from the library as an e-book for my Nook so that neither my mom nor dad would know what I was reading. That whole week I remember I was reading every chance I could get. I would walk around the house with my Nook glued to my face just wondering what would happen next in my book. The morning that I finished it, my mom was home from work and she was cleaning the house. As I am coming up on the last few pages, she comments on how much I have been reading lately. That’s when the light clicked in her head that I was reading the book she told me not too. Similar to your case when your mom found out, I was not punished, severely at least. My punishment for reading that book was to help her clean the house all day. Do I regret reading the book? Not at all – it was too good to put down.
Answering your second question about to what degree parents should regulate what their kids read, I think they should monitor until they know their child is capable of understanding everything that the novel is going to present to them. There are certain topics in books, such as war, religion, and breaking the social norms that I think parents should be aware of and ready to discuss with their kids if they are going to allow them to read books that provoke those critical thinking processes about those subjects mentioned as well as others. Is this to say that I think children should not have the freedom to choose what they read –no. I just think that for a period of time, it should be regulated just so that the child is not opening up the flood gates to a topic that can get them in trouble if discussed in the wrong context. I also think that there is a specific time and place when a child should learn about some of the content that makes those books “adult books” rather than the ones that are in the children or young adult section, which is why I think they should be regulated to an extent.
I don’t think I ever experienced parental censorship as a child. Some of the earliest memories I have of my father was him teaching me his life philosophy, “There are two keys to success in life: Read everything you can find, and be good at math. If you can do these things, nothing else matters”. Growing up, I was encouraged thus to read whatever I could find. I would be dropped off at the library and told to spend the day reading. I found all kinds of books spanning from young adult novels to adult mystery romances. I knew that stories were stories and they kept me captivated for much of my youth. My parents were very controlling and conservative with the way they raised me, but fortunately, I was never given some sort of censorship when it came to my pursuit of knowledge through reading.