No way, they were thankful I wanted to read at all.
Not really. She wouldn’t BUY me books that were advanced for my age. (Like when I wanted Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret? when I was eight). But I used to read her romance novels all the time, and she knew I was looking at the “sexy parts”, and I don’t think she cared.
As for TV and movies, my mother was more concerned about me watching horror movies, because she knew I’d probably be too scared to go to sleep. Lots of swearing, some sex, no big deal. (Hell, I used to watch Guiding Light with her when I was a kid – when I was three I probably could have told you entire plotlines.)
Nope. After I learned to read, I read everything. Everything! I went through the Golden Book Encyclopedias for kids, and later we had a complete leatherbound set of encyclopedias I also read, cover to cover. My aunt was a librarian, and I hung out at the library in the adult room (where I got my start as a fount of useless information). Later, I found mom’s Harold Robbins paperbacks cleverly hidden under the couch and got quite an education regarding smut! (I do remember reading disturbing stuff that really was too ‘adult’ in nature, about man’s inhumanity to man*, and getting upset over it, though. So maybe someone should have been paying more attention to what I was reading. But no one did, this was back in the days when kids went out to ride their bikes all day and come home at dark.)
*This was when the Enquirer was a real rag featuring gruesome stories and closeup pictures of murders. Children shot in the head and killed on a merry go round. Bodies buzzing with flies found in a car. I was horrified, but I guess you gotta leave Never Never Land and Dr. Seuss sometime.
The only limit I had was no RPG books. I eventually got that one overturned.
As for It, it has a somewhat creepy group-sex scene between a bunch of tweeners. I could see that being a bit much for a parent. (I read it as a tweener, and I thought it was AWESOME).
I do remember one time when I was about 8 and watching The Return of the Living Dead with Mom (well she was going in and out of the living room) when Linnea Quigley did her cemetary striptease. Mom told me it was “not polite” to look at naked people (she didn’t bother to turn the TV off or anything). BTW it took me a couple of years to realize that women didn’t quite look that that down there.
I was not limited at all in my access to any media. Even so, I was still compelled to be covert in my borrowing of my older brother’s porn mags.
My mother sold World Book Encyclopedias, and we got a free set. Since I had severe insomnia I’d stay up half the night reading them. I wound up reading the entire set.
Nope, no restrictions except for the more expensive hardcover books. We had to be old enough to know how to handle them without damaging them. Both my parents were readers and we had hundreds of books in the house. Now, TV on the other hand, was restricted quite a bit. Not so much what we kids watched as how long we sat in front of the boob tube turning our minds to mush. Reading or playing outside was preferred to that.
No restrictions. Usually, when I wanted a book for me, all for me, it was age-appropriate. Dad didn’t mind buying me RL Stine or Newberry medal books. But my parents’ library was open to me, so I could read whatever.
Upshot is I read books that went over my head, and years later, I had to reread them to “get them”.
No particular restrictions. Nothing with naughty pictures, of course. But the bookshelf in my bedroom ended up being stocked with a whole bunch of stuff that my dad had ended up collecting over the years, including quite a bit of Robert Heinlein (and none of the “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel” stuff either). Some of the later Frank Herbert books got similarly… interesting.
The only restrictions I had mainly were that I couldn’t read if I had homework to do. My dad had been known to confiscate books from me when I was reading at inappropriate times (and on one occasion, a math teacher swatted a book out of my hands with a meter stick, which is pretty danged entertaining, now that I think about it. That’s always been my problem though. I’m super smart, love reading and absorbing knowledge, but if it doesn’t interest me (as many required studies don’t interest me), I just have the hardest time buckling down and doing it.
Well, no Playboy or Mad, that was a foregone conclusion. But my parents did always encourage me to read at a higher age level than whatever age I actually was. When I was 13, Caravans by Michener and Flowers for Algernon both made the house circuit.
I was the youngest of six kids. My oldest brother had made a scene at his Catholic high school because their library’s set of Harvard Great Books was missing Darwin and Freud. At the other end of the spectrum, my youngest sister had incredibly tabloid-y tastes. My parents largely left me to my own devices, which was mostly comic books (Yeah, dig me, casting stones at my sister’s tastes!).
Yes, I was pretty restricted in both reading materials and movies I was allowed to watch. I regularly got grounded from recreational reading, for no apparent reason. My parents also did NOT like for me to read science fiction or fantasy, as they considered it to be inappropriate for girls. I did manage to sneak in quite a bit of reading in the genres, by getting library books and borrowing books from my maternal grandfather, who was quite a fan of science fiction, but had no use for fantasy. As for movies, my parents didn’t like for me to see anything other than what would be considered a G rating until I was about 17…and by then, I was living with my grandparents*, and my grandmother took me to the movies SHE wanted to see, like Cabaret. My parents also never let me attend a rock concert.
I allowed my daughter to read just about anything she damned well felt like. I told her that I’d explain stuff to her, and that she might find some books boring now but they’d be more interesting when she got older. In my experience, if a kid gets hold of a book that’s too mature in subject matter, more than likely that kid won’t continue reading the book unless s/he has to finish it for school. The problem is pretty much self correcting. Now, in the case of some horror works, then a parent should know what is horrible about the book, and then step in with some guidelines. But for the most part, kids will be more fascinated than scarred for life, even with horror novels. Now, a 10 year old might not understand all the implications of To Kill a Mockingbird, but s/he might understand some parts of it.
*I had run away from home for a day because I felt that my parents were too restrictive. I refused to go back to their home.
Naw, my dad never bothered to control what I read.
Now, TV, on the other hand… couldn’t watch Three’s Company, though I had a copy of The Romance of Lust on my bookshelf. What’s up with that, Dad?
I’m confused; by “down there” are you referring to her bikini wax or her leg warmers?
Reminds me of recently when somebody donated a bunch of books to our school. The librarian catalogued the ones she wanted and put the rest on a table, and teachers could snag them for any purpose at all (personal reading, giving to kids as a present, classroom libraries, etc.)
When I saw a couple of the classic Dungeons and Dragons Choose Your Own Adventure books (Revolt of the Dwarves and the like), I snapped them up. And my assistant took kids in small groups down to the library to see if anyone found a book they wanted.
For the most part it was fine. But one book was apparently unfamiliar to either the librarian or to my assistant. The bright kid who saw it thought, “Cool! Aliens!” and happily showed it to me when he got back to the room.
I confiscated it.
My assistant was irritated at me, so I explained to her about Ripley’s ongoing battle with creatures that burst from your abdomen, and explained that a novelization of that movie wouldn’t be appropriate for a seven-year-old kid. I also dogeared the page where a woman in a mucousy cocoon, limbs broken, belly already swelling, begs (successfully) for Ripley to shoot and kill her.
Normally I’m not all about restricting a kid’s reading. I think this was the right call.
Nope. My mom didn’t even keep me away from her erotica collection - I remember reading* Delta of Venus *when I was 7 or so! :o
The only time I can ever recall my mother restricting what I could read was right around when Interview With The Vampire came out as a movie. I read it, didn’t really like it all that much, but decided I’d give one more of her books a shot and grabbed the first book in the Beauty series from my mom’s bookshelf. I was probably 14 or 15 at the time. Mom was displeased.
I ended up reading it in bits and pieces when I was home alone, of course.
I pretty much never had any restrictions. Once when I was 12 I asked my mom about a copy of “fear of flying” that I saw on her bookshelf, and was told I wasn’t ready for it yet. Once, someone my dad worked with saw me reading Catcher in the Rye (I was probably 14 at the time), objected and got all judgy with him for letting me have it. Hee.
I guess I’m in the minority in that my Mom did restrict the books & movies I read/watched, but not too badly. Pretty much she didn’t let me read the Harold Robbins books that she and my aunts were all silly over, and anything else that was too racy, at least not until I was in high school.
Also couldn’t watch most R rated movies until high school (this was before the PG-13 rating was around).
No restrictions. My early reading mostly came from reading whatever my mom had read (thus I read Clan of the Cave Bear in the 4th grade; and The Joy of Sex was in a cabinet next to the couch, though that didn’t interest me until I was a bit older). Combine that with being in a public library system that did not believe in any age related restrictions (seriously, if you were willing to go ask the reference librarian for it they’d let kids look at Playboy, very few of us kids were willing to ask though) and the window in which I was reading “age appropriate” books was very small.
That’s why I have very little knowledge of the typical kids classics. Either I never read them in the first place, or I read them when I was too young to particularly remember.