The Eyes in the Peacock's Tail

[dianeduane]

Once upon a time, the King of the Greek gods, Zeus, was getting ready for yet another episode of cheating on his wife. His latest target was a beautiful mortal girl named Io, whose resistance he had been wearing down by sending her a series of racy dreams of which he was the star. Having finally arrived on her doorstep to make his case in person, Zeus wrapped the two of them and that whole region of the world in a thick black cloud to hide the incipient goings-on.

This was a tactical error. Zeus’s wife Queen Hera noticed the peculiar change in the weather, checked Olympus to see if her husband the Cloudgatherer was on site, and – not finding him there – immediately put two and two together and headed for the area of sudden overcast. She dispersed the clouds and found herself looking at her husband and an extremely lovely (and one must assume, confused-looking) white cow, which Zeus explained had sprung from Mother Earth just that minute.  Not even slightly fooled, Hera promptly confiscated the cow, and assigned to guard her – or rather, to make sure her husband didn’t get anywhere near her – one of her security staff, a creature by the name of Argus. Argus was completely covered with eyes that stared in every direction and saw everything for miles around. The eyes even slept in shifts, so that the watcher’s pitiless regard was inescapable by night or day. Hera went off confident that her husband’s case was well handled.

Myths being what they are, of course, such a situation can’t last. Zeus quickly has words with Olympus’s resident thief, trickster and inside-job man, Hermes, who disguises himself as a handsome shepherd boy and  shows up in the flowery meadow where Argus is guarding Io. There he proceeds to bore all Argus’s eyes to sleep by telling him serial tales of mortal romance.* Then, when the last of Argus’s eyes fall asleep, Hermes pulls out his sword and kills him, signaling, if not the end of Io’s troubles, at least the beginning of the end. Later on the frustrated Hera winds up putting all of Argus’s eyes in the tail of her favorite bird, the peacock — probably as a reminder to Zeus that at least this once she caught him in near-flagrante — and over the subsequent centuries Argus’s name becomes a metaphor for unsleeping watchfulness./p>

The world is full of people who appoint themselves to roles like Argus’s, as would-be watchers and guardians. Sometimes they’re even useful in those roles. Their motives aren’t always suspect: sometimes they genuinely mean well. But good intentions aren’t always enough. And sometimes these can lead the would-be guardians into serious mistakes, especially when their intelligence (in the informational sense) is incomplete or poor.

It looks like we’ve just seen an example of this in a recent Wall Street Journal article, which spends a while purporting to analyze the “fitness for purpose” of some modern-day young adult fiction, the kind that deals openly with difficult topics like self-harm. The reactions to the article’s assertions have been widespread and passionate. Readers and writers alike have responded at length, and lots more opinions and links to them, short and long, are to be found on Twitter filed under the #YASaves hashtag. Having read the article, though, I found myself reacting most strongly to two specific passages that jumped out at me: and the reactions came on two different levels. The first passage really annoys me as a former psychiatric professional:

"Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures."

 “Indeed, likely –"? I’m ready to be shown the clinical study that underlies and supports this statement. So sweeping a generalization has no business being made in a public forum without a solid underpinning of fact. What fact  I can bring to this issue is that in my time as a psychiatric nurse who worked with adolescent / young teenage patients, I never came across a single case that supports any aspect of the columnist’s opinion.

If she can produce any evidence to reinforce her claim besides what I strongly suspect is wishful thinking, I’ll be glad to examine it and draw my own conclusions as to its validity. But I really doubt there is any such data. And if (as I suspect) that conclusion just came out of the columnist’s head as a feeling or a theory, or was a vague summation of even vaguer third-person anecdotal material, I have one word for it: CODSWALLOP.

What I found while doing one-to-one therapy with adolescent patients is that to successfully start working through their problems, what they initially needed more than anything else was confirmation and acknowledgement from those around them that the problems existed in the first place – that they weren’t unique or alone in their situation, that other people knew about it and that it was real. Books dealing with the problem in question were and are often a useful tool to help that acknowledgement get started, and even (in some cases) in getting a patient past their own denial that they had any such difficulty at all.

When I was practicing, such books were often painfully dry and didactic, and I wish there’d been more young adult fiction available on such subjects… for fiction (especially when done well) tends to lecture less than nonfiction and is more likely to be successfully internalized because you’re hearing, not a dry recitation of fact, but someone’s voice. Young adult novels that deal honestly with such issues unquestionably have value for teens groping their way toward understanding of how to tackle their problems. They invite them into the dialogue: they make the troubled teen part of the solution. And at the very least, they let their readers know that they’re not alone. There are times when that knowledge is enough to mean the difference between life and death. Here, without any doubt whatever, YA really does save.

A side issue here: there are probably some who think I have no dog in this particular race, since my books are not known for dealing with edgy teen issues, and also have no explicit sex, not a lot of violence, and language not much stronger than the “crap” level. This is personal preference for me, a matter of style. But I support my colleagues who are working the grittier and more uncomfortable part of the young adult coalface, and I strongly dislike the casual, if not outright mischievous, mischaracterization of their works in the columnist’s article. She has done them a disservice, and owes them an apology… which unfortunately I doubt will be forthcoming.

So much for that. Now for the other statement, the one that got up my nose in my role as a former teenager: It is a dereliction of duty not to make distinctions in every other aspect of a young person's life between more and less desirable options. …Oh really, now. Every other aspect? And not just distinctions, I bet, but decisions. So there are no areas in which the child or young adult can be considered competent to have his or her own opinions, and make his or her own choices, without having them vetted and pre-ratified by the ever-watchful parent? (Because from the WSJ article, you get a strong feeling that when Mommy Says No about, for example, a book -- well, the poor young adult just gets to pull on his or her PJs and go to bed early: there’s no mechanism for appeal.)

I really hope that’s not what the columnist is suggesting, because I don't know about the rest of you, but it sounds like Hell on earth to me. And that would not just be because I’m one of a generation who would have laughed out loud at the very idea of my parents organizing, for example, when (or if) I went out to play, or who or what I played with. In my spare time I went where I pleased, lay out in green fields for prolonged periods staring at the sky and doing nothing remotely “useful” or educational, adventured widely through my neighborhood unsupervised, climbed trees and fell out of them, stayed out after dark (having informed my mom that I’d be doing so), and had a secret place to go and read where I spent hours on end, with no need to account for my movements to anybody. To have somebody ruling yes/no on every aspect of my life until I was eighteen? There’s a word for that kind of life. It’s jail. (And some of you will probably recall J.R.R. Tolkien coming up with something similar in a discussion of the value of the literature of escape. “Who are the people most concerned with the possibility of escape?” he asked. “The jailers.”)

I do not accept that life for kids is all that much more dangerous than it was when I grew up. I just don’t. The difference between now and fifty years ago is that we now openly discuss the dangers that were often only whispered about half a century ago. Yes, the new millennium has thrown up many new and different threats to the concept of the peaceful and safe childhood (itself something of a construct, but that’s a subject for another post). But those threats and challenges ought to be met in some other way than locking the kids up in a virtual tower until they’re eighteen. The fairy tales (always a treasury of useful archetype) tell us straightforwardly what happens to such children.

Under no circumstances am I questioning a parent’s right or responsibility to protect his or her children from danger. But I do think we’re building the protective fences way too high. Unfortunately, the sensationalistic focus of mass media on unusual events like the kidnapping, abuse and/or murder of children has successfully exploited the increasingly anxious love and cynically fanned the fears of a whole generation of parents, until they genuinely think it right that everything about their children’s lives must be rigidly controlled until they are no longer legally responsible for them.  People who advocate some kind of return to common sense in these matters are practically condemned as the Antichrist. Freedom? That’s something a child will be allowed to experience only after it turns eighteen. Or maybe after it exits college at age twenty-one or thereabouts, and starts trying to find employment sufficient to pay off those pesky student loans. Until then, many North American parents are trapped in their role as frazzled, Argus-eyed controllers of their children’s mobility, their after-school activities, their diet, their access to money, their online activity, and a whole lot of their entertainment.**

Books, though, are revealing an interesting chink in this theoretically all-encompassing defense. Some parents are apparently beginning to find books scary because they’re not like the ones they read when they were kids… and because they understand from firsthand experience that books interact directly with the imagination in an essentially noncontrollable way that movies and TV and computer games do not. After all, when you sit down to watch a TV show or a movie with your child, you can at least verify that you’re being presented with the same imagery and deriving generally the same meanings from it. But you can’t be sure of that with a book: the reader does so much of the work in his or her own head. As a result, the hypercontrolling parents whose attitudes are reflected in the WSJ article sometimes seem to act as if they consider books to be a potential delivery system for some dangerous drug that will overwhelm their child’s defenseless mind. (The concept that the child might be able to stand aside from the book’s content and evaluate it independently before accepting or rejecting it is of course rejected out of hand.)

But I think this attitude is a pointer toward the underlying problem responsible for the article’s tone of righteous (and frightened) indignation. The presence of all these awful books on the market suggests that there must be a lot of young adults reading them – kids who are obviously out of the absolute control of their parents! (Horrors.) And this undeniable fact will surely provoke, in the hypercontrolling parent, a fear that their own defenseless child might possibly listen, not to the parent, but some book-pushing friend, and read one of these deadly objects… and the parent won’t be able to stop them from internalizing the contents. This will be due to a terrible truth that no hypercontrolling parent wants to face, but which books force them to confront more clearly than usual: Though so many other aspects of your child’s life can be controlled by you, the inside of your child’s mind is simply not one of them. With this unbearable admission, the hypercontrolling parent’s only daily certainty in their relationship with their children – the illusion of control – suddenly fades away.

And those of you who may have been children at one point or another will possibly remember another aspect of this truth (if you actually remember your childhood, and haven’t idealized it into a few frozen images. So much of this whole situation flows from people not remembering...) You know that if a child is absolutely focused on a parent not finding out about something, odds are good the parent never will. Let the parent have eyes like an Argus, they still won’t be able to keep their child under those eyes for every minute of the day. And Hermes, in his aspect as the wily patron god of untrammeled communications, is always lurking just around the corner: for if a child really wants to read something without this parent knowing it, he will find a way.

One of my parents tried to exercise the columnist's style of control with me, at one point, way back when – trying to keep me from reading material “too old for me” and calling the local library to say that I wasn't to have access to it. I was outraged, for I considered what I put into my brain in my spare time to be my business – my personal area of greatest freedom, and one I wasn’t going to give up for anybody. (I probably didn’t phrase this exactly this way, being nine at the time. But the above sentiment renders exactly how I felt.) The joke, though, was that I needn’t have wasted the outrage, because I quickly discovered for myself that there were simple ways around the silly parental prohibition (which I knew was silly because I knew what I was after – general knowledge, nothing salacious or evil).

Don’t get me wrong here. I’d have been delighted to discuss the whys and wherefores with the parent in question, so that we could work it out, they wouldn’t worry, and I wouldn’t have to hide what was going on. But it was imposed on me as a diktat, and all such attempts on my side to get some negotiation on the issue failed. So I gave up on what was plainly a wasted effort and got on with business… though I was still sad that my parent, even after all those years spent raising me, plainly didn’t know me very well at all. For the reading I was interested in doing, I simply took a bus to the next town over and used their library instead. They didn’t know about the “guidelines” my parent had issued to the home library, and the local library could report (if asked) that I was obeying the prohibition. Problem solved. (Was I guilty about deceiving my parent? Yes. For about five minutes. [Five minutes is a surprisingly long time when you're nine.] Did my parent ever find out? No. Did I suffer any harm from it? Not in the slightest.)

The point is that now it would be way, way easier than that to game the parental system. You could make a case that books are the most easily concealed of all information technologies, and as technology continues to explode around us all, the situation just gets better for the clandestine reader. Besides libraries where your kid can read out of your sight, there are computers that don’t have NetNanny installed on them. There are other kids’ smartphones, left unlocked by parents not quite so controlling or paranoid. You think you’ve got your own kid’s phone locked down? What technology can limit, technology can defeat, and info on how to hack the protective apps on a phone, how to get around the parental-choice software on a laptop or a desktop PC, is common currency in every schoolyard, in newsgroups and online forums, on Facebook and in Tumblr and on Twitter and many other places. It passes in stealthily exchanged thumb drives, and jumps like lightning by text, in codes parents can’t understand, from phone to phone. Even that epitome of “safety” and supervision, the playdate, can be subverted if the kids know what they’re doing, and are careful about how they coordinate the manipulation of their parents. (It’s a choice irony that parents who have been manipulating every aspect of their kids’ lives for decades routinely have no idea where the kids have picked up the talent, and are horrified when it’s turned on them.)

It must be terrifying for the hypercontrolling parent to be jailer in so porous a prison. You have to feel for them.

…For about five minutes. If you’re a parent who’s become committed to such a role, you have only one hope of successfully discharging your “duty.” You must bribe or blandish or scare your prisoners into believing that your actions are either for their own good (that most horrifying of justifications, sometimes worst when genuine), or just too much trouble to fight. Otherwise you have no chance of maintaining any significant level of control. The minute the kids decide to stop cooperating, you’ve lost the game. But while you’re winning, you’re as much a prisoner of the regime as they are. And you’ll remain so until your children leave home – possibly ill-equipped, due to your actions, to be out on their own in this century – and you collapse, exhausted.

I think there is a way out of this trap. But it’s dangerous, and it flies in the face of too much of today’s unquestioned “wisdom” about childrearing. It involves building a genuine informed partnership with the resident child or young adult as regards reading material, with give and take on both sides; and a real attempt to put yourself into the other party’s head, instead of merely imposing sheer brute-force control (which will eventually fail).  It involves actually reading books that you’ve heard scary things about to find out if those things are true, before you start issuing reading fatwas.  And – scariest of all –  it involves standing up to other parents who will try to force you back into the role that they’ve succumbed to for the sake of being seen as a good parent, sometimes even when way down deep they’ve disagreed with it.

Of course it won’t be easy. As my mom used to say (I believe quoting the cookbook writer Peg Bracken), “For every pint of wine you drink in this life, you’ll drink a quart of vinegar.” While forging and implementing this agreement with your child, there will be screaming and yelling and carrying on, “human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria,” and so forth ad infinitum. But if you stick it out and make the break, you and your child together will have a chance to experience a shared experience of literature that in retrospect will make both childhood and parenthood memorable.

And as the certainty sets in that your children are going to be all right – as they assert their ability to handle their own growing freedom, and you realize that you’ve clawed back at least one precious sector of yours -- you will at last be able to sigh with relief and start shoving those sleepless eyes back into the peacock’s tail… right where they belong.

---

*Attn: romance-writing colleagues: I’m not taking a poke at you. It’s in Ovid. Apparently after a long warm thyme-smelling Greek afternoon of sweet reed-piping and storytelling, the tale of Pan and Syrinx is what pushes Argus over the edge into Snore City.

\**I have to add that most European parents I know from a quarter century’s life on this side of the water find the whole North American “helicopter parent” concept kind of bizarre: some use it as yet more evidence that a lot of my people need their heads felt. As a former head-feeler, I normally invoke possible conflict-of-interest issues and seek an excuse to either leave or order another pint.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Codswallop is precisely the word for it. Damaging codswallop at that. She clearly has no idea what kinds of problems some kids have to face up to.

[neonhummingbird.livejournal.com]

My foster sister/mother of my godchildren is the best parent I know. She encourages the kids to read (a lot. Seriously. I haven't seen a kid who reads like my godson since, well, me.) And she does tell them things like, "I've read this book and I feel it talks about some things I feel you're not quite ready to handle yet. So let's a wait a little while before you read it. Here, try this instead." And they do, and she makes sure to ask them to come talk to her about anything they need to talk about or ask questions about, and so far, she's raising a couple of brilliant kids.

Which proves, to me, that parental oversight in reading material is a good, responsible thing, as long as it's not carried to extremes and everyone is reasonable about it. Arbitrarily cutting off everything about a certain publisher-issued age limit, on the other hand, is probably not going to end well for anyone....

As for the rest of it? Yeah. Codswallop. What a moron -- and a damaging one, since she has an audience that might listen. (And we won't discuss the nice little gender-appropriate categories she put all of her recommendations in. Oy!)

[lemur123.livejournal.com]

My parents didn't even do that. When I was 9 and they found me sobbing while reading 1984, they let me keep on reading. Same when I was 10 and woke up screaming at night after reading about the Holocaust. Same when I was 11 and found out that the Holocaust wasn't just an elaborate, implausible, horrible fairy tale.

Looking back, my parents were either brilliant at letting their kids rapidly absorb adult concepts, or incredibly negligent.

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

Is this a dry run for an article in the Atlantic or something similar? Because if it isn't, it should be.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

:) Thanks. No, it's just a blog.

[ailbhe]

My reading child is only barely seven, but so far "I think that book has scary grown-up things you won't like in it" seems to work. Her tastes aren't like mine were at all.

[batyatoon]

May I link to this? I've been saying "Yes, yes, exactly" aloud for several minutes while reading it.

(Also I am unreasonably delighted by the Ghostbusters quote. :D)

[dduane.livejournal.com]

Of course, go for it!

[jaxomsride.livejournal.com]

Up until now I have never realised how privileged I was in having parents that never censored what I read, except for sexual content, when I was under 16. Even then, so long as it wasn't too explicit it was allowed. After all Dragonflight was first read when I was about 11.

I followed the same principle with my daughter too. I never censored, though did advise as to content. Though I warned her about the Twilight series, not because of content but because of how they were written.
Even now she still asks me sometimes to read a book before her, just to let her know if it has any explicit scenes, so she can avoid them.

[caiteydid.livejournal.com]

You read that when you were 11 too?! I thought I was the only one who'd gone and done that! I guess my mom lucked out with me- I hate explicit scenes and will skip them. Too many of them in a book and I'll just give up reading it. She never, ever read any of my books, and really didn't even watch where I was getting them. I feel like a lot of parents probably wouldn't let their 13 year old wander about in the Adult Fantasy section grabbing books at random because of pretty covers, but I guess my mom figured, "If you're old enough to ask, you're old enough to know." Good and bad, I guess, but I still love reading probably because I could read whatever I wanted, and I'm generally pretty good at judging which books I probably don't want to read! :P

[miladygrey.livejournal.com]

I was twelve. *grins* And although my mom was a little concerned about my predilection for sci-fi and fantasy (a genre she's never liked), she couldn't follow me to the school library. which had most of McCaffrey, and Piers Anthony, and Jane Yolen...oh, and Diane Duane. She finally just asked me to not read anything that would give me nightmares. and let it go at that.

[caiteydid.livejournal.com]

Ha! My predilection for fantasy is 100% my parents' fault, and they had no idea what can of worms they were opening at the time. My dad handed me The Hobbit one day at the bookstore because he and my mom thought I needed to read something other than horse stories, and he'd read it as a kid. I didn't like that one much, but I did love the dragon. So then I started reading anything with dragons in it, and then other things, which I still picked for intriguing titles or pretty covers. What can I say? "So You Want to be a Wizard" is a really /interesting/ title! :PPPPP

[noirrosaleen.livejournal.com]

Ohh, yes. I read like a fiend my whole life, but the real romance started in 4th grade when Mom handed me Ship Who Sang. All downhill from there... Don't think they ever censored me, actually, or at least can't think of anything they told/asked me not to read. Guess they assumed if I was old enough to read it, I was old enough to deal with it. Did a lot of recommending, too, which I can now return the favor on. ^_^ Looking forward to doing so with my kid.

[mkcs.livejournal.com]

I read Anne McCaffrey straight off my parents' shelves when I was 10 and 11. I remember finding 'Restoree' a bit challenging, but then I was reading so many books, so fast, that any one book stood only a small chance of having a major impact on my development.

I am with your mother on the 'old enough to ask' thing. The only problem is that kids often lack a lot of context.

I see the parent's role in helping their kid cope with difficult concepts as being one of providing context, either through discussion or by recommending more books.

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I'm reminded, too, of the anti-bacterial brigade. It's the same principle, and one that is more prevalent right-pondia than helicopter parenting is.

Let them eat dirt, let them bleed, let them see ugliness and unthinking nastiness and evil. And give them cake, and plasters, and love and understanding.

[jenni411.livejournal.com]

Amen, said the librarian.

[jerel.livejournal.com]

My nephew is 10 but his Lexile is 900 (meaning that he can comprehend passages written at a 9th grade level.) Is he emotionally ready for something like Speak? Definitely not. Luckily, his aunt is an English teacher with a passion for YA lit, and is helping him find things that are content appropriate. :)

YA Lit is one of the few places, I think, that teens can see other REAL teens. I don't watch a lot of TV, but from what I have seen, none of them resemble my students, and they don't face the problems my kids have to deal with on a daily basis. Also, the format of the medium makes it impossible to gain insight into thoughts and feelings. You can do that in a novel.

[kengr]

At some point, children of such parents will either decide that they cannot trust their parents or that even if their parents are somewhat trustworthy, they are totally clueless as to the child's needs and other issues.

At that point, the relationship will be permanently damaged. And likely never recover.

In my case, I'd long known that mom's ideas about life wee not compatible with the reality I was having to endure. But when the final straw came it was because we'd negotiated an agreement (in return for some extra chores I was to get to stay up late on Friday's so I could watch 3rd season of Star Trek).

When I'd done the work and time came for her to honor her side of the bargain she blew me off. At which point I went from trying to work with her to trying to minimize the unpleasantness when we clashed.

After decades of reflection I came to the conclusion that in spite of what it felt like at the time, Mom had good intentions. But that she expected me to react in certain ways when I was wired very differently.

Parents need to not only learn not to "hover" and not to try to control everything, but also that different kids are wired differently. One kid will see something you set as a challenge. Another will see the added tasks as punishment.

If your methods aren't producing results, you need to stop and consider that they aren't being seen by the child the way you see them. In which case "more of the same" will make things *worse* not better.

The classic example from my experience was that working harder to get a task done, just got another task assigned, rather than resulting in more free time. So *of course* I quit trying any harder than I had to.

[deire.livejournal.com]

One thing from reading your books and essays...how did you learn to be so very wise? :)

[dduane.livejournal.com]

(Assuming that this is wisdom...) Very slowly. :)

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

When I first heard of this in someone else's blog, my response was incredulous and nearly inarticulate. Yours is, no surprise, vastly superior. Thank you, m'lady.

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

All that one article made me want to do was go write a dark YA novel...I feel like I'm not doing my duty as a writer!

[dduane.livejournal.com]

Well, you should go do that sooner or later, because I think a dark YA novel from you would totally rock. ...Even if there weren't vampire eggplants in it. :)

[3rdragon]

I mostly stick to the lighter side of YA. But I would read a dark one with vampire eggplants in it.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

My partner says that if you set out to raise a child, a child is exactly what you'll get -- a permanent child, who doesn't have the skills to be a functional adult. I think it's by no means coincidental that the first generation of helicopter parents are now starting to complain about their kids being unable to hold a job, unable to make or keep to a budget, continuing to want to live with Mom and Dad and be clothed and fed without putting any of their own effort into it.

When I see one of those hyper-controlling parents in action, my immediate thought is, "Y'know, that kid is going to hit 18 and run flat wild, and will probably get into far worse trouble than you fear for them because they've never had the chance to develop mature judgment." And as someone who suffered from overprotective parents before it became fashionable, I have to say that I speak partially from personal experience; the only thing that saved me was that I was a lot smarter than they ever gave me credit for being, and could figure out for myself that certain tempting options were Not A Good Idea.

[caiteydid.livejournal.com]

Amen to finding a way to read what you want- and I'll second that kids WILL find a way. With me it wasn't so much my mom censoring what I was reading, but she figured out that I loved reading so much it'd make a great punishment when I was bad if she grounded me from it. Long story short, I learned to get around this by stashing books. I'd stash them in my backpack, my school locker, my band locker, my desk at home, at the head of my bed- anywhere she wouldn't find them. That way when I was grounded from reading I'd still be able to read.

Actually, to my mom's credit, she figured out exactly what I was doing and that I was doing it because I LOVED reading. Not wishing to dissuade that, she found other things to ground me from.

I think the amount of censoring and prohibiting going on these days is absolutely ridiculous. How can these kids possibly be prepared for the world in general if they're practically wrapped in bubblewrap their whole young lives? My elementary school outlawed Red Rover, for Heaven's sake, because it was "too dangerous". They didn't even like me teaching the kids sharks and minnows because it included tagging and some kids tripped and some fell down and one (Heaven forbid) SKINNED HER KNEE.

It's all ridiculous. A ridiculous article making ridiculous assertions, and I'm sure there are parents who'll read it and agree. At least there are some excellent people out there writing some very well-thought-out responses! Thank you!

[thelauderdale.livejournal.com]

Amen to finding a way to read what you want- and I'll second that kids WILL find a way. With me it wasn't so much my mom censoring what I was reading, but she figured out that I loved reading so much it'd make a great punishment when I was bad if she grounded me from it. Long story short, I learned to get around this by stashing books. I'd stash them in my backpack, my school locker, my band locker, my desk at home, at the head of my bed- anywhere she wouldn't find them. That way when I was grounded from reading I'd still be able to read.

LOL. My parents did the same thing. One time it was no reading at all. Another time it was no fantasy books until I shaped up at school. For the first, I just read in my bedroom with my back against the door. For the second...heh. I remember reading The Stonor Eagles by William Horwood, which is the dual story of a (fictional) artist named Jim Stonor and an (anthropomorphic) eagle named Cuillin, and later, her offspring, blending the mundane with the sweepingly mythic. All my mom could see, of course, was the cover, which had a large eagle on the forefront. I told her it was a biography. It helped that, when she flipped through it, the chapters were preceded by various "quotes" from newspapers and journals. She didn't notice that they were all dated several decades in the future...

The closest my parents ever came to censoring was when my dad found me reading Clan of the Cave Bear? He didn't forbid me, but he did say, "Ah, you might want to wait until you're a few years older." I was twelve. I wasn't very far along, so I shrugged and put it down until I was 14 and picked it up again. My response: "That's it?" I had read much more sexual/explicit/disturbing stuff than that, including books my father had given me - like Richard Monoco's Parsival. When I was nine! Honestly, people...

[moonreviews]

My mother just put her Clan of the Cave Bear books on the uppermost shelf so I couldn't reach them (I couldn't even see them at first). Below that were all my father's science fiction books and classics so I read all of those in elementary school.
For the rest my parents really didn't do any censoring and my mother said "Go borrow from the adult section of the library on my card" when I had finished all the children's books (as I was reading adult books at home already anyway).

[ericavdg.livejournal.com]

I'm glad there's a sane person left on this planet when it comes to childrearing besides me and my husband!

We are good friends with a couple who have a daughter, almost 16, who is 6 months younger than my daughter; they are so close they call each other "sister," even on Facebook. Until very recently, M was not allowed to read a book until her mother had read it first and gave her approval. She was not allowed to read all of the Harry Potter books, only those in which Harry was no older than M. (Of course she read them all in pieces at the school library, the local library at which she volunteers, and at friends' houses. Same for other forbidden books.) When we mentioned to her mother in passing that the mob of girls at the sleepover that was just ending had stayed up till 2, M was forbidden to go to sleepovers or have any of her own for a year because she had stayed up past 11, a dictate we knew nothing about and which seemed pretty early for a 13-year-old at a sleepover.

There were all sorts of other perplexing and limiting rules placed on M by a woman we though we knew well and who we liked very much. You will no doubt not be surprised to learn that M became depressed, which her parents brushed off as "teen-age angst" when she told them how she felt. Eventually, after she literally begged to be taken to her doctor, M began taking antidepressants. It backfired, because although the poor kid felt somewhat better, her parents became more restrictive. Eventually she made a suicide attempt and spent two weeks in a psychiatric unit for teens.

The drama is by no means over. She's taken to using her mental illness as an excuse for all kinds of things, for example. I hate to think what will happen when M goes away to college, as she wants to do, rather than go to the local state school. I think a previous poster's phraseology "hit 18 and run flat wild" (beautifully but, starcat jewel) is what will happen. At least we're around to help pick up the pieces, because we all love M.

Keep up the good work! My daughter and I love your books. And please, brush this post up and submit it to major publications!

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

That family desperately needs family counseling -- although I daresay that the parents' reaction to that idea would be the same as my parents' when I suggested it: "Why would we need that? There's nothing wrong with US; if YOU'D just change, everything would be perfect!" (Not in so many words, but that was the gist of it. They did generously offer to get me "the mental help I needed".)

[elialshadowpine.livejournal.com]

If the girl is anything like me, that's exactly what will happen. I grew up in a similarly restrictive household, except I was homeschooled and basically did not see people my own age. My reading material and online access were unrestricted, but that was it, and even that was under threat. I hit 18 and moved halfway across the country to be with someone I met online. I had no other options because I did not know anyone locally and had no idea of local resources, and my dad had me isolated from the side of the family that would have helped me; it was either get out or kill myself.

I got very, very lucky, and everything turned out alright, but that's certainly not true for everyone. :-\

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

I read the article. It's the idea that one should police what's inside people's heads that's particularly repellent. When I was quite a young child (7 or 8), I started having terrible nightmares. My parents politely suggested that reading Roald Dahl's The Witches just before lights out was perhaps not the wisest idea in the world. But all they did was suggest that reading scary books just before sleeping wasn't a good idea for a child with a vivid imagination. (And lo, it turns out it still isn't a good idea. I don't read gruesome murder mysteries involving serial killers before bed even now, when I'm notionally a grown-up of some sort.) They tended to vet books they bought for me until I was into my teens (they didn't give me Duncton Wood until I was 12, for example), but not books I got from the local library. I was reading books from the 'adult' section when I was 10 (no such thing as a YA section in a small local library then!). Obviously my parents suggested whether I was likely to enjoy something or not, but anything sexually explicit bored me at that age, and gory violence I didn't enjoy reading.

But reading never made me want to emulate destructive behaviours. It was usually pretty clear when someone was acting destructively, and you didn't want to do that, did you? But reading did help me make sense of some things. For example, I went to a Catholic boarding school. You got told about the biology of puberty and reproduction, and a whole set of moral rules that seemed to have no relation to reality. We read Judy Blume, which helped us get a different view on things. Obviously, Judy Blume was banned, so we sneaked it in and read it anyway. (And let's be quite honest: if it wasn't banned we might not have been quite so interested in reading it.) I'm not convinced that reading books with self-harm in is any worse for young people (or older people) today than reading Judy Blume was for teenagers in the early 90s.

[sauced-again.livejournal.com]

A part of me suspects the author's daughter is showing some characteristics Freeman doesn't like, and she's looking for a scapegoat. After all, it couldn't possibly be her parenting at fault.

Re: TW for talk of self-harm

[sistercoyote.livejournal.com]

This, exactly; I never read about a cutter and it never occurred to me to use a knife, but I tore the hell out of myself with my own fingernails.

[genarti]

Yes indeed, to every word of this.

[thenetwork.livejournal.com]

*thunderous applause*

You need to publish this somewhere. The world's supply of wisdom needs topping, and this is finest grade. Well done.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

It's out there doing its thing. :)

[thenetwork.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's good. Also, I have read every one of your books I could lay hands on, which is by now quite a few of them; and quite a few of those several times, with renewed enjoyment at every reading. Your work is very lovely. Thank you for it, too.

[noirrosaleen.livejournal.com]

I love posts like this from you. It's like getting a small dose of the Manual - an easily-read piece of common sense that can have huge effect on lives.