I don’t write for children, but preventing children from reading my stuff isn’t my problem; that’s their parents' job.
Besides, when I was 10 my idea of light reading was Stephen King, Anne Rice, Michael Moorcock, and Clive Barker. I sure as hell wasn’t reading what passed for YA fiction in the 1980s and 1990s; once I got past the likes of Judy Blume & Beverly Cleary it seemed to me like YA was nothing but the print equivalent of ABC AfterSchool Specials. 🤮
Such fiction might have been suitable for other children, but if I had been forced to read it myself and denied access to adult fiction I would probably have stopped reading for pleasure like most children do. (I blame the parents. And the public schools.)
In fairness, the likes of Robin McKinley, Susan Cooper, Diane Duane, Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Tamora Pierce weren’t writing blatantly didactic fiction for children and teenagers, but I don’t recall seeing any of those authors in my school library. Furthermore, having a teacher expect me to read Bridge to Terabithia or A Wrinkle in Time after having read adult sf and fantasy like Dune, The Fortress of the Pearl, The Vampire Lestat, A Wizard of Earthsea, or The Damnation Game felt a bit insulting.
Especially when I had worn out my school’s copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology in second grade. Now that was full of R-rated material despite the Bowdlerization inherent in Victorian-era writing.
It was funny, however, to have my parents worry about me discovering magazines like Playboy and Penthouse as a thirteen-year-old when I was getting sex education from Stephen King, Eric van Lustbader, and Michael Moorcock in novels like The Stand, The Ninja, and Gloriana; or, The Unfulfill’d Queen. It was certainly more explicit than the sex ed I was getting at school, and there were scenes in the novels I mentioned that made Playboy and Penthouse about as interesting as the lingerie section in a Sears catalog; I’d read them for the articles. And then there was Anne Rice’s novels of the Mayfair Witches, starting with The Witching Hour. 🍆
If you haven’t read The Witching Hour, Rice wasn’t nearly as explicit in those BDSM-themed tales of Sleeping Beauty she had written under a pseudonym. And not all of the participants were over eighteen years of age, either. Anne Rice wasn’t one of those Puritanical writers who think that teenagers don’t get horny, or that they wait until they’re married after college and spend their wedding nights peeling the shrink-wrap off each others’ genitals.
Fortunately, the sort of sex ed I got at school was “wrap it to avoid HIV, other STDs, and unwanted pregancy” instead of “wait until marriage or you’ll make Baby Jesus cry”, but there was nothing about courting or consent. It was Stephen King who exposed me to the notion that it might be better to scratch my own itch than to pester a woman who wasn’t into me.
Let’s just say that my wife had little objection to my DIY supplementary sex education a decade later. Nor did any of the women I had dated before I met Catherine. I was not (and most likely am still not) the lover I had wanted to be as a young man, but I could never claim ignorance as an excuse. I had read the fucking manual.
Maybe it’s because I’m a relatively young member of Generation X, but I don’t believe in ‘age-appropriate’ fiction. It might not be appropriate for you to let your child watch They Live or Hellraiser when they’re 10, but that should be your decision based on your knowledge of your particular child, not some arbitrary age cutoff. My dad took me to see They Live in the theater when I was 10, and other R-rated movies of that sort, and it did me no harm. But that was his decision; nobody dared tell him that John Carpenter movies or Stephen King novels weren’t “age-appropriate” for a ten-year-old boy who was already coping with real-life violence at school.
I didn’t respond well to being told what to read as a kid by adults who weren’t content to recommend or suggest a book, and I still don’t respond well to being told that I must read a particular author or a certain book. It might not be intended as a command, or be as peremptory a demand as it sounds like to me, but that doesn’t stop me from disliking such treatment. I suspect that most people dislike such treatment, even as children, but instead of choosing open defiance as I did, they grudgingly comply and eventually stop reading for pleasure altogether. If you want kids to retain the joy of reading as adults, let them choose for themselves even if you don’t necessarily approve of their choices, unless they’re picking truly egregious books like The Turner Diaries, The 120 Days of Sodom, or Atlas Shrugged.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
a tangent on reading Ayn Rand
Of course, if the purpose of a system is what it does, then the way we teach children to read and dictate their reading material certainly seems to be working as intended; as Ray Bradbury wrote in Fahrenheit 451, why burn books if nobody wants to read them?
Nevertheless, if you’re serious about letting kids be kids, then stop trying to protect and shelter them. Stop fetishing their ignorance as ‘innocence’. The whole point of being a kid is to become an adult, and part of that is them learning things you aren’t comfortable with them knowing sooner than you’d prefer. So, let kids read what they want. Be there for them if they have questions. If they have a few nightmares or are confused by something they aren’t old enough to understand yet, that’s part of growing up.
I’m not joking, goddammit. As long as the kids aren’t reading Mein Kampf and concluding that maybe Adolf Hitler had the right idea, they’ll probably be fine.