They don’t want to know that there’s a very simple solution if you’re concerned a book is too mature for your child: read the book first.

B-b-but… that would entail ACTUAL EFFORT! Why, I might be required to read TWO BOOKS in a single YEAR — even more, if my reaction fails to convince My Darling to cease and desist. Worse, I might be forced to admit that I don’t know everything, or that my child is far more insightful than I have been for a decade.

All they care about is being outraged.

Much easier, is it not? Such an approach goes hand-in-glove with other social trends, such as the willingness conviction that Teh Guvmint Should Protect Our Childrun — e.g. by requiring any adult who might interact with young adults to be certified as having passed a background check. (Charles Stross comments here on what this could mean for UK authors.)

In these days of seriously over-protective parents, it’s important to remember that kids are remarkably resilient. Most of us read any number of adult books as kids. Some were probably disturbing, and some were scary and some were simply incomprehensible. Sometimes kids understand the concepts they’re reading, but sometimes they only understand the words. Kind of like the rest of their lives, in fact.

Besides, kids take their cue from the adults around them. If adults gasp and gobble in outrage about a book, kids will think it’s outrageous. Otherwise, they probably won’t.

I enjoy it when journalists just make up random facts to support their assertions. As if dark teen books just appeared yesterday (Tenderness is ten years old, The Chocolate War 30 years old.)

That is a deeply creepy article in a lot of ways and frankly does a lot to explain why the UK YA market lags behind in the US/Aus market in learning how to appeal to reading teens who don’t want to be treated like children. This year is the first time I’ve walked into a bookstore and seen that they’ve separated their teen section out from their children’s section, which is full of stuffed bunnies, rabbits, and sparkly rainbow stickers. The idea that a teen might not want to be caught dead surrounded by stuffed bunnies apparently only just caught on. Perhaps not coincidentally, YA book sales are on the rise this year. I wonder why.

People kept finding the video (tape) in random places: stuffed into plants, mired amid the romance paperbacks (ha), in History, in Pro Sports, in Science Fiction, next to World At War in the nonfiction video section. To my knowledge, he never discovered nor did he care that we had the book version of the same title, on the shelf, happy as a clam in fiction.

So. You don’t have to be Thinking (only) of the Children to be a ridiculously self-important twerp! Now you know.

At least the first commenter on the Mail piece was a voice of reason.

As a parent, I find it harder and harder to stay ahead of what my son is reading or watching. I was really strict when he was 3, but it becomes more of a challenge. Getting good summaries of things helps, but one parent’s concern is not another. So, it’s always hard to judge and you do have to rely on your child to put something down if they don’t like it or whatever.

I remember going up to my mom after reading “A Bridge to Terabithia”* and crying asking why anyone would write a book like that.

I can imagine, now that I am a parent, what she felt. Many of us parents are over protective because we don’t want that crying child to ask us why.

I don’t understand the uninformed outrage, but I understand the want to protect.

*I think that’s what book it was. Books should have HEA endings!!!

@JS Bangs — I don’t think most people would argue that 12-14’s are adults, but there’s a pretty big difference between, say, a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old. A 14-year-old is almost certainly most of the way through puberty, has had four more years of sex education at school, may well have had a boy/girlfriend or two, is in middle or high school rather than elementary school, etc., etc. In terms of books, a 14-year-old is likely to be interested in things (romantic relationships, for one) that would bore the average 10-year-old out of his/her tree. They are not the same readership at all. Where that leaves the 12’s I’m not entirely sure … except that I remember 12 and 13 were really awful ages …

The author for Horn Book did not see anything wrong with the book, though he was not a fan of it, and he asked if Mr. O’Rielly had read it. He said he did not have time to read all of the books discussed on his show.

This was a 32 page children’s book with lots of pictures. An adult could have read it in 10 to 20 minutes. An adult can read a typical YA novel in two or three hours.

But, this “controversy” is not really about reading books.

Obviously, everything above is total ridiculousness, and I don’t know why Bermudez is so controversial. There are, in fact, YOUNG ADULT gay people who need to read books to see that they are normal. There is nothing strange about it. And we have plenty of books about straight couples hooking up in YA novels, yet somehow this fails to be a problem.

It’s possible that some people consider 12- and 14-year-olds to be children. I certainly don’t consider them adults. No offense to the 12-14 set that reads this blog, but I remember what I was at that age, and “adult” doesn’t enter into it.