Censoring your kids' reading (was Self-Evaluation)

[Amy Z]

Naama wrote:

> On a different note. I have to say that as a person who doesn't 
have 
> children, but who remembers her own childhood very well, the 
thought 
> of parents censoring their children's reading raises my hackles a 
> bit. I would have hated my parents to do that to me. I won't take 
an 
> oath on it, but I think that if I had children, I'd let them read 
> whatever fell into their hands. Children definitely need protection 
> in the real world, but I'd prefer to give children freedom in the 
> realm of imagination. Just my IMO (and I reserve the right to a 
> complete change of mind when and if I have a child. <g> )

I had a powerful experience with this at age 14, and what made it so 
powerful was the fact that my parents had never directly censored my 
reading up until that point.*  I was given Truly Tasteless Jokes for 
my birthday--remember Truly Tasteless Jokes?--and my dad, being the 
kind of person who took an interest in what his kids were 
reading/doing/listening to, thumbed through it.  He was appalled, and 
he ordered me to throw it out.  If you'll pardon the language, he 
said that it was absolutely disgusting to refer to women as cunts and 
Jews as kikes and blacks as niggers and find those things funny, and 
that he refused to have that filth in his house.

The whole thing, as I say, had a particularly strong effect on me 
because I had always had the run of the family bookshelves, with 
their Lady Chatterley, Joy of Sex, Huck Finn, etc.  My dad is, 
furthermore, not attuned to politically correct language (IIRC, he 
snorted when his daughters came back from their first semester at 
college insisting on being called women), and I've never known him to 
destroy a book.  The latter injunction had such a strong effect on me 
that, feeling that nothing justified throwing a book out, I disobeyed 
him and only buried the book in a drawer.  But after a few weeks I 
did throw it away.  He had succeeded in making me feel disgusted by 
it, and to this day I think he was right.

Like parents who make every rule sound like life or death and whose 
children therefore don't believe them when they say "don't touch that 
charcoal lighting fluid," I think parents who exercise too heavy a 
censoring touch run the risk of losing their credibility.  

Amy


*They might have done so in subtler ways.  My mother claims that when 
we were little, she hid "The Little Engine that Could" because she 
hated it so and we wanted her to read it to us over and over again.  
Not exactly a candidate for the "most banned books" list, but it 
drove her nuts.