Follow up to Jenny's post

Jenny’s previous post about what kids read seems to provide a nice segue into a topic that is both timely and annoying: book censorship!
Ah yes, the every present and controversial topic of what books are appropriate for what age. I’m going to state right away that I am against censorship of books. I think parents have the right to dictate what their kids read, but not what other peoples’ kids read.
A woman who has at least one middle school kid in the Fond du Lac School District filed complaints about 7 books at Theisen Middle School library: One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood, Girls in Pants, Forever in Blue, Get Well Soon, and What My Mother Doesn’t Know. Two librarians got fired from a public library in Kentucky for not allowing an 11 year old check out The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume IV: The Black Dossier. A woman from Crestview Florida is trying to get a graphic novel (shelved in the general collection, not the children or teen section) pulled from the public library that apparently traumatized her teenage son. And those are just the stories I’ve read about in the past couple months that have to do with libraries.
Now, out of all those books, the only ones I’ve read are the Traveling Pants books. I read the first two books in high school and the other two in college. I distinctly recall feeling like I was too old to be reading the books in high school. They are not inappropriate. There is pretty much zero language as far as I remember and no violence. There is definitely some discussion and having of sex, though nothing actually “on screen”. And the repercussions definitely seem to point toward the message of “don’t have sex if you aren’t ready”. I’m going to guess that most of the other books from Theisen Middle School are the same thing.
Now here comes my argument. Maybe the books that the Fond du Lac mother wants to get banned are inappropriate for her daughter. Some 6th graders might not want to read books where there is sex and people die. Some 10th graders might not want to read books with that kind of stuff. However, there might be 4th graders who are fine with reading about sex and death. Herein lies the problem with censorship. One person cannot tell another person’s kid what they should read. The Fond du Lac mother can tell her daughter to not read the Traveling Pants books; maybe her daughter is not mature enough to read them. The Fond du Lac mother cannot tell another parent that their kid can’t read the Traveling Pants books because that kid might be plenty mature.
In my family, we could read whatever we wanted to. That isn’t to say that my parents encouraged my sister and I to read books that were inappropriate to us…up until middle school, I read pretty much at my level. My sister was reading at like a 4th grade reading level in 1st grade, so she obviously was going to be reading pretty heavy stuff pretty early. Starting in middle school, I started reading above my grade level; I found all the books at the middle school library boring. When I was in 8th grade, I started reading Stephen King. I’ll write a whole blog post about my love of Stephen King, but I was like 13. Funnily enough, no one ever really said anything about it until the summer before my junior year in high school, when I was 16. I went on a mission trip with my church down to Tennessee. I happened to have been reading Carrie by Stephen King at that time and I brought it with me to read in the car. When we got back from the trip, one of the adults from the trip asked my mom if she knew what I was reading. At 16, I had an adult worried that I was reading a book that was inappropriate. Around where I lived, at 16 you could usually get into R rated movies with no problem. And maybe that adult wouldn’t have let her kid read a Stephen King book, but she had no right to tell me not to.
My advice to parents is this…make sure your kids are reading books that are appropriate to their maturity and leave everyone else alone.