doulicia's comment

I started this as a comment in response to doulicia's comment to my last post, but it got too big. She said:

I am interested in your liberal attitudes toward reading. I remember reading a lot of things in 5th-8th grade (Go Ask Alice, Stephanie Can't Come Out To Play, Summer to Die) that really made me anxious about the world. A bloody booger makes me think leukemia and I never so much as smoked a cigarette for fear of that slippery slope into base addiction.

Of course, maybe it's a chicken and egg thing. Perhaps I was an anxious kid who sought reinforcement of my perceived scary world in fiction.

Thoughts, psychoanalyst?

Can kids learn to fear the world by reading material that they aren't psychologically/emotionally sophisticated enough to deal with?

Yeah, I read some of those same books and they affected me deeply, too. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. A lot of that stuff is part of life, stuff we all have to wrestle with anyway. I'd rather have my kids get it from fiction than movies or, god forbid, personal experience. What I hope is that my kids will feel free to talk with me about what they're reading. Or let me read along with them. So far, this has happened. Reading along with my son has been one of the greatest pleasures of my parenting life so far.

My parents had the same policy with me when I was growing up. Not only did they not censor my reading ever, but they actually encouraged me to read some pretty weird stuff. My mom was the one who got me hooked on James Bond. My dad, who's a professor of clinical psychology, had me reading books like The Fifty Minute Hour when I was in my teens. I don't think anyone alive is psychologically or emotionally sophisticated enough to deal with that one. (It's a collection of psychoanalytic case histories, extremely Freudian and explicit. A real page-turner -- I'm not kidding -- but quite inappropriate for a young adolescent.) And yet, it felt good to be able to read whatever I wanted. I felt like (at least in this realm) my parents respected and trusted me.

When you say "learn to fear the world" I assume you aren't talking about healthy, adaptive fear; you probably mean over-the-top anxiety. I think some people are more prone to anxiety to begin with, and reading books like A Summer to Die (which, incidentally, was written by Lois Lowry!) can feed their anxiety, but if it wasn't bloody noses, they'd find something else to obsess about. I don't mean that to sound flip, by the way. I've never gotten over that bloody nose scene, either.