Someone made an offhand comment in the CS thread about To Kill a Mockingbird (too lazy to go back and find the link, sorry…but it’s really irrelevant) about thinking that their 10 year old child was too young to read the book and was holding off allowing her to do so, and it got me thinking.
When I was growing up, my parents really didn’t put any limits on what I was allowed to read that I can recall. If something sparked my curiosity, and I felt like reading it and could get my hands on it, I read it. This was helped by the fact that my school library allowed kids in the gifted program to borrow any book in the collection (my district had no middle school, so we had a K-7 and 8-12 split, and the lower school had a section of the library that was supposed to be reserved for grades 6/7 only). I also had a large supply of popular bestsellers, as my grandmother was an avid reader who belonged to several book clubs, and she would buy all manner of Judith Krantz, Stephen King, Robin Cook, etc. new releases and then gather them up every few months and send a huge box of books to my Mom.
Now, I won’t lie…I was pretty circumspect about reading some of the racier stuff (like Judith Krantz or Jackie Collins), but I do specifically remember my mother handing me Firestarter when I was 10 and saying “Here, I think you might like this.” I’m pretty confident that if Mom had realized I was reading the racy stuff, she’d have just asked if I had any questions or wanted to talk about it and that would have been that.
So, how about you guys? Did you parents monitor what you read, and restrict it in any way Make you hold off reading things they thought you were too young for?
If my mother hid my dad’s playboys, does that count as a “restriction?”
My sister also hid/locked up her comic books and paperbacks. I assumed she was ashamed of her taste in reading. I read a couple and they were basically baby romance novels.
Nope. Not only did they not monitor what I read I was also free to watch or listen to whatever I wanted. For awhile after we got DirectTV Mom tried using the parental blocking option (the code being the last 4 digits of our phone number), but I figured that out pretty fast and the subject was never mentioned again.
My mother encouraged me to read everything. She had zero restrictions on what I could read, so long as it wasn’t outright porn. However, she forbade me to read Steven King’s It. I was about 12-13. I waited a few years and read it in highschool. For the life of me, I could not figure out why. It was no worse than any other book I read at the time. I should remember to ask her next time I talk to her.
I read what I wanted, when I wanted, and that was the end of it. I’d like to say that it was one of issues my dad and I butted heads on (though we didn’t), and I came out on top… but it was never an issue at all.
Nope. I had free access to my parent’s book collection. The second book I recall reading is Creatures of Light and Darkness, which has a few sex scenes, not that I knew what a sex scene was. And it was hard enough to understand at that age that a little not-too-explicit sex flew completely under my radar anyway.
alphaboi867, it’s funny you should mention TV, because while Mom never blinked an eye at anything I read, she forbid all of us from watching Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley during their original runs (although I remember watching them when they went into syndication and were on after school) because she said that she thought they were demeaning to women (Fonzie snapping his fingers and all the women in the room running over and cooing, etc.). We talked about that recently and she said she regrets banning them outright…she thinks letting us watch them and explaining to us why she disapproved would have been more effective. As it was, forbidding them just made us want to watch them all the more.
Nope, I don’t recall my parents ever interfering with my reading. I think I mostly read age-appropriate stuff, so it wasn’t too big a deal, I guess. I did definitely read a few Stephen King novels in junior high, and I didn’t hide them and my parents didn’t seem to care.
My parents read newspapers and magazines. Sis was also not much into books. I, on the other hand, clammored to go to the library as often as possible. They never limited what I read, but my mom would complain about my checking out a dozen books or more at a time.
I do recall one instance, I was maybe 9 or 10, checking out Helter Skelter and my mom questioned if I would be able to handle it. She didn’t tell me to put it back, didn’t question my choice, just a simple question. I never finished the book.
I have never restricted what TheKid could read, either. When she was in 3rd grade I received a note from her teacher asking that I not allow her to bring her book of Edgar Allan Poe stories for free reading time, as she felt it was inappropriate. I responded, basically saying “Too bad.”
Not at all. In fact, my dad thought it was kind of neat that at the age of five, I was reading the Funk & Wagnalls set from the living room bookcase.
When I got to school for Grade One, we went to the school library on a weekly basis; the first book I remember checking out was one on Argentina. It was followed by such things as Berlin: City Split in Two and other history and geography/social studies type books.
About the time I got to Third Grade, I joined the public library system. If anyone tried to limit what I read, it was the librarians there, telling me I couldn’t go into the Adult section and check books out there. Telling my father that they had refused to allow me in, he accompanied me on my next library visit and made sure I was able to gain admittance as well as actually check out books.
I learned to read in the middle 1930’s, mostly from my Mom who was an English teacher. She read me a lot of things like Ivanhoe, etc.
My folks never monitored what I read in any way - but there was nothing like Playboy or Hustler back in that antedulivian epoch.
I devoured *John Carter of Mars *and that sort of thing. And my grandparents had a lot of juvenile books what would be considered incredibaly naive now. I loved them.
Nope. They didn’t restrict what we could listen to, either. My parents left most of their record collection lying around for us to peruse including their George Carlin albums.
However they were strict about movies. Nothing PG-13 or over, I think even after we were 13. I did not complain, tho. Mom told me I would be scared of those movies and I’m sure I would have been. Rocky IV (when I was 6) scared the shit out of me.
Naww, my mom would catch me reading and force me to go outside and play with the other kids. Biyatch.
Seriously, I would have to literally hide somewhere to be able to read. I remember hoovering through the ancient encyclopedia set we had in the basement, just because I was book-starved.
My parent’s encouraged me (and my sister) to read all the time, and I devoured books like they were food when I was a kid.
Several times my parents were perplexed by what I was reading, but they would ask me questions about it and as long as I understood it all well enough to explain it to them (even if they couldn’t quite grasp things), everything was fine.*
*For example: both parents were amazed at the sheer number of characters in LOTR, which I began reading when I was like 9 years old. I remember my mom standing with the synopsis in the start of Return of the King in her hand and quizzing me on who all these people were. She simply couldn’t believe that I could possibly keep all these people and events straight. When I answered every question perfectly, she shrugged, rolled her eyes a bit and gave me the book back.
No, but they really should have. But, after I read the complete Bible (both old and new testaments) at 17 months, they were like, “Girl, you just read whatever you want.”
Like everyone else here in Lake Woebegon I was reading ahead of grade level as a kid, but my mother was mostly fine with me reading whatever I wanted. (I did get plenty of that “Why don’t you stop reading and PLAY OUTSIDE?” business, though.) I don’t remember her ever monitoring my library selections or expressing any concern that a book might be too difficult, scary, or upsetting for me. Books with sex scenes or that she thought were likely to have sex scenes were occasionally an issue, though.
The example that most sticks in my mind is that when I was about 11 I saw a copy of The Mists of Avalon at the bookstore and I asked if I could get it because I loved anything that had to do with King Arthur. My mother looked at the cover* and said no, because “It might have a lot of sex scenes.” But then when my aunt was visiting she took me to the bookstore and said she’d buy me a book, so I got The Mists of Avalon then. Ha! My mother wasn’t the type to do sweeps of my bookshelf though, and I don’t think I made any particular effort to conceal the fact that I had the book she’d refused to buy for me.
Funnily enough, she had no objection at all when I started reading the Anne Rice vampire novels at about the same age (definitely no older than 12). I don’t think she had any idea what they were like, she probably thought they were horror novels.
*Which isn’t even particularly sexy, it looks like this.
