I don’t think parents should just go to the library on demand and ask for a list.
HOWEVER, I DO think they have a right to know what their YOUNG kids are reading.
That’s why I said lower the age, and I’d have no problem with proposing this.
The “right of pricacy” reason doesn’t seem to cut it with children. One could argue, on those grounds, that parents could not require schools to tell them their kids’ grades. Can someone from the “right to privacy” camp explain how that privacy does not extend to school grades?
I thought conservatives were the folks in favor of personal responsibility? After all, if a parent wants to know what his kid is reading, he should take personal responsibility and ask the kid. That allows the parent to tailor the degree of trust/supervision according to the child’s individual maturity level. Having a law try to dictate this kind of involvement strikes me as anti-conservative, actually.
(And I can’t wait for whuckfistle’s follow-up thread – “Repubs don’t want voters to know what their government is doing.” :rolleyes: )
Because school grades quantify academic performance, and library records reveal what the child wants to know? Because school curriculums are a matter of public record, and personal reading selections are not? Because grades don’t have the potential to reveal deeply personal struggles that could be damaging to the child if the parents knew of them?
I think it is stupid to make this into a Dem/Rep or Lib/Con issue. It is neither.
Asking the kid would be great, and I’m sure if he were reading 'Charlotte’s Web" you would be an honest answer.
But if he was a disturbed kid reading, “How to make a bomb in your garage” he might be less likely to give an honest answer.
That’s when a parent might need to have the library cooperate in finding out what is going on.
It does-but not until the child reaches the age of 18.
None of the libraries I’ve ever been to have books like this. Public libraries are not the internet. 
They certainly do have books some parents might find objectionable, but those objections are usually on idealogical grounds–and the kind of parents who typically hold those objections are precisely the kind of parents that libraries should provide a respite from (like the examples I gave earlier).
As a librarian accredited by the ALA (heh), Metacom has it dead-on.
The ALA lobbies to protect the intellectual rights of children as if they were adults. Whether that’s valid or not, I’ll take a stab at explaining the position. Let me introduce another strawman I feel is more parallel than school grades.
A wife is being abused, and checks out books on abuse, or divorce, or accesses the library’s hotline. If the husband found out, there’s a possibility for violence. If a child is gay, and checking out books on homosexuality, and the parents find out, there’s a possibility for violence.
As a young adult who was constantly checking out books such as Annie on Her Mind and not wanting my mother to find out I was reading gay literature, I’m grateful.
I don’t understand why parents are unwilling to go into the library with their children and see what they’re reading, but they’re willing to expend great energy to ban books and pass laws. Either parents take responsibility for the raising of their children, or lose the right to comment on it.
I was trying to find a cite on the “Final Exit” controversy, wherin a girl checked out the book from her library and committed suicide, and legal chaos ensused, but I cannot. I don’t remember the outcome of the case, either, but if anyone does, it might provide a more concrete foundation for discussion. The issue is very complex, and the linked article in the OP is very good.
That’s why I said it should be any child age, oh, 12 to 14, instead of 16.
No, what I said is not analogous to a parent not being able to tell the kids what they can watch. Your analogy makes absolutely no sense. It would be more analogous to passing a bill requiring the cable company to tell you what programs your child watched even though you chose to put a tv and cable in the child’s room and allow the child to watch tv there without your supervision.
If you’re so concerned that your kids will get into trouble by borrowing books or CDs from the library then you shouldn’t let them get a library card or you should accompany them when they go there. It’s that simple.
That’s the definition of a strawman. No need to refute it because nobody here said what you are attributing to them.
Yes, we all know there is only black and white, right and wrong, with no shades of gray in between. :\
Nobody is taking away a parent’s right to know what the child is doing, because it’s not even a legal right as far as I know. The way I know what my children are doing is by earning their respect and love, talking to them, treating them as people instead of possessions, and being a hardass when I need to.
I don’t need a bill passed to turn public servants into informants to know what my kids are reading because I can walk into their room and look, look in their backpacks, or even just ask them nicely what books they are reading. If I find out they are reading things that I have told them are forbidden then I will take that into account when deciding whether they can go to the library without supervision. Seems pretty fucking simple to me.
There is no legal argument stemming from your example. The reason people are liable for damage to library property is the same reason you are liable for property damage committed anywhere in the USA. The reason you are liable for overdue books is because that is part of the agreement you enter into when getting a library card. If these had any legal significance in forcing the libraries to hand over reading lists then they wouldn’t have to pass a new bill.
Aside from that, you’re off topic. The bill is about requiring libraries to supply lists to parents of media borrowed by their children. It has nothing to do with the actual borrowing process, only informing on what was borrowed.
To all:
If this bill is good, would you support a bill that requires libraries to supply a list showing what books/media the child looked at in the library even though the child didn’t actually borrow them? Remember, your kid could go there and read a book WITHOUT CHECKING IT OUT FROM THE LIBRARY! That sounds dangerous and you’ll never find out even if this bill goes into effect!
We are, but we recognize that children are members of a class presumed not to be ready for full, adult responsibilities. So we want to protect them, by ensuring that the State does not interfere with the natural parental desire to know about their children’s lives.
And, if he wants to know what his kid is reading, and takes personal responsibility and asks the library, we (or at least I) would like to be sure that the library does not attempt to veto my desire to know about my child’s life.
Children don’t have a right to privacy from their parents. If I feel it necessary, I search his room, or check what sites he accesses on the Internet, or find out where he is going and when he will be home.
Or, what books he checks out at the library.
Regards,
Shodan
Libraries have kept patron records private for a long time, and included children’s records as a matter of course. If the parents want to see the record, they need only ask the permission of the child. (Or search their backpack, room, whatever…) Libraries’ primary goal is to get needed information into the hands that need it, and if that means not telling parents that their kid has been reading about gay issues, then so be it. They are adamant about patron privacy.
From a librarian’s standpoint, the parent ought to be in the library with a younger child anyway. Libraries are public places, and open to anyone who wants to come in–and they get a lot of weirdos with time to kill. If you had met the people I have met in the library, you would not let your under-14 kid go there alone anyway. Parents do that all the time, because they think of libraries as safe places with kindly babysitters in all the rooms, but libraries aren’t like that. They are completely open, and even a vigilant children’s librarian can’t keep every strange person out.
Another point: libraries do not keep long-term records of who has checked out what. That would take up far too much space and open the avenue to abuse of patron records. Once you return your book, the system forgets that you ever had it. The only information that is retained is the number of times any one book has been checked out, not who has done the borrowing. If your kid is not reading about bomb-making this week, then there is no way to find out if he ever did before.
As a librarian and a mom, I support this idea. And I go with my kids to the library.
Rysler: Not buying your wife/husband strawman. Two adults is not the same as an adult and custodial child. Does your org propose total privacy for a child of any age?
I agree with Guin (aothough I might quibble about the specific age). I just don’t see how you can argue for complete privacy for a child of any age. Seems like something for individual communities to decide, though, as opposed to the state level.
Unlike Guin, I don’t know if I’m as leftist as they come, but I’m pretty solidly left. However, one of the areas where I think the left has been consistently wrong is in its attempted extension of freedoms to minors. Parents have to have the ability to exercise reasonable supervision over their kids, and parents who aren’t raising their kids in extremely unusual ways should be secure in the knowledge that the larger society is supporting, rather than undermining, their efforts to raise their children. Parents should have the sense to give their children increasing discretion and freedom as they approach adulthood, but they shouldn’t be legally bound to do so.
My one concern with this particular bit of legislation is for librarians: as a habitue of libraries, I know quite a few of them, and I can’t see them being comfortable with the idea of turning a boy’s or girl’s reading list over to their parents. In a situation of potential conflict between parent and child, the librarian gets put in the middle. This is a problem that wasn’t present with the Children’s Online Pornography Act, for instance.
I’d feel a lot more comfortable with legislation allowing parents to limit in advance what kids could check out, than requiring librarians to tattle to parents on what they already had checked out. Or even (for library systems like mine, where I can access my library account over the Web) legislation that would give parents direct access to their children’s accounts, should they want it. But I’d prefer that the librarian isn’t put in the position of having to reveal information.
I don’t know about y’all, but when I was a small child of ten I spent every Saturday walking around the Chicago loop alone, enjoying the Chicago Public Library, the Art Museum, the Planetarium, Aquarium and Natural History Museum, all within short walking distance of each other.
“Amerikan” parenting is child abuse, yet it’s okay to let a 10 year old run around Chicago all by his/herself?
In what year were your parents letting you do this, 1955? In today’s day and age any parent that lets their kid loose like that is begging for tragedy to strike.
I think it’s kind of funny that in one breath you drone on about how you were raised by a pack of scholars, and in the next you get basic historical facts wrong.
The 5th amendment was most certainly in place during the “bad old days” of slavery – it’s part of the Bill of Rights, passed immediately after the ratification of the Constitution. And neither the 5th nor the 14th amendment had anything to do with getting rid of slavery. That honor falls to the 13th amendment.
I like my strawman, if only because there are some conservative circles who would say that wives still do not have a right to check out a book (or refuse sex, or vote, or hold a job) without their husband’s consent. What if a Muslim woman wanted a divorce? What if an Indian girl wanted information on female circumscion? But bringing that information in makes the comparison uglier, and I’m not sure I can stand by it.
The ALA does propose total privacy for a child of any age, yes. This is why Dr. Laura campaigned against the organization, much to the befuddlement of the general public, who likes libraries, and much to the consternation of librarians, who have enough problems with political pressure groups as it is.
I personally agree with Guin and others that 13 is the appropriate age. That’s the age that a child can legally look at porn and sign up for things (eBay, Yahoo!) on the internet without parental consent, so I take that as a de facto standard.
I’ve typed and erased this three times as a non-point, but since it was specifically addressed: Many libraries have put into place rules against non-supervised children in the library. “No children under 8 permitted without a parent or guardian. Period.” Parents will be called, child services will be called, police will be called type of deal.
This is somewhat of a non-point because this rule was not adopted in order to protect children, but to protect the library from babysitting duties. Parents who drop their children off at the library while they go grocery shopping, or whose children go to the library every day after school until their parents get off work–these are the targets, not necessarily the censoring parent.
RTFirefly, some libraries have special library cards for kids under 13 which restrict check-out to YA books, but this is problematic when it comes to schoolwork (YA nonfiction isn’t very good). And I like your framing of the problem.
Why is it so hard to understand that libraries are third parties that have no interest in your relationship with your child in regaurds to regulating reading material. Yes, they have a monetary interest regaurding late fees, because owed money is involved. But outside of that, why do you expect them to be required to cooperate with you in helping you snoop? The library is not vetoing your desire to know about your child’s life, it’s just not actively helping you. And why should it?
Maybe so, but this has NOTHING to do with what we’re talking about here.