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[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/7npea1q

hacash https://hacash.tumblr.com/post/687772919906091008/not-to-be-an-edgelord-but-sometimes-i-see-tags :

dingdongyouarewrong https://dingdongyouarewrong.tumblr.com/post/686828708262215680/maybe-im-just-being-edgy-or-something-but-i-think :

dingdongyouarewrong https://dingdongyouarewrong.tumblr.com/post/686828473209192448/not-to-be-an-edgelord-but-sometimes-i-see-tags :

not to be an edgelord but sometimes i see tags like this and i wonder if i’m some kind of fucked up joker guy. like this is for real and not a bit? the hunger games was too dark for y'all at 12-16? at the target audience age it was written for? seriously?

maybe i’m just being edgy or something but i think getting to read some fucked up murder shit as a kid is good for you and i think adults trying as hard as they can to keep that stuff as far away from kids as possible are lame

where’s that post abt if you only read wholesome stuff#you don’t get

practice at approaching darker things#relatedly will & I were talking abt books we were into as kids#and he said he’d never read any jaqueline wilson bc it looked like girl stuff#and then I told him some of the lssues they cover and he was#:o :o :o <https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/where's%20that%20post%20abt%20if%20you%20only%20read%20*wholesome*%20stuff> (via sweetlyfez​)

This reminded me of one of the biggest ‘this book changed my life’ moments of my childhood, because like fez I was pretty into Jaqueline Wilson as a kid.

For those of you who never read her work - and you really should - Wilson covers seriously heavy shit (divorce, mental health issues, homelessness, blended families, homeschooling, parents dying, the works) while still managing to stay pretty kid/YA appropriate. I devoured a lot of her stuff and, being a fairly advanced reader, one day stumbled across ‘The Illustrated Mum’ at the school library.

This is definitely one of her best works: a girl called Dolphin lives with her sister and her tattoo-loving single mother Marigold, whose struggles with untreated bipolar disorder means that more often than not both girls end up looking after her. The emotional crux of the book comes when, after her older sister moves in with her dad, Dolphin comes home to see her mother in the middle of a heartbreakingly-written breakdown, and makes the painful decision to call social services.

It’s an incredibly good book - deep, dark, painful, gut-wrenching, damn near harrowing. And, considering most reviewers agree it’s suitable for ages 10 and up, possibly not something I should have been reading unsupervised at the age of 7.

I remember being horrified when Dolphin comes home to see that Marigold, convinced her tattoos are what’s stopping her from having a lasting relationship, has painted herself in white enamel paint and is disassociating naked in the bathtub. I was listening to one of my Mum’s CDs at the time and over, twenty years later, when I hear a particular song (Runaway by Cher, if anyone’s interested) I still remember how I felt when I read that chapter. After that scene I hid the book under my bed, I cried, I couldn’t bear the thought of reading any further.

And you know what? I was fine. I wasn’t traumatised for life. I told my parents about it, and my dad read the book and wrote me a long, lovely letter about how Marigold was a good person who just needed help, that Dolphin shouldn’t have had to look after her mum when she was only a kid herself, that the two girls deserved a stable home life. We talked a lot about people who struggled with mental health issues (this was in the 90s before it was cool) and kids who don’t get the stable home they need; my parents asked if I wanted to finish the book and I said yes. (Spoiler alert: Marigold gets the treatment she needs and is reunited with her daughters.)

Now, if my parents had known I was reading a book marked specifically for older kids and up, they would probably have tried to have an ongoing conversation with me as I was reading to make sure I understood everything and to see if I had any questions. (They would definitely have told me not to read it just before bed.) They might have told me not to read it for a couple of years - but certainly not to hold off beyond the target age. And the point stands, it was a dark book written for older kids, and reading it didn’t ruin my entire life - instead it opened my eyes to a reality that I had never been introduced to before.

And crucially, I was able to be introduced to that reality when my parents got involved in my reading material and, rather than censoring it, talked me through it and explained the hard stuff to me. I wonder if so many parents clutch their pearls about unsuitable reading material because they don’t actually want to be bothered talking with their kids about difficult topics. (Your picture was not posted)

Comments

[sabotabby]

I worry about this generation. I guess I belong to a generation where children's media had scenes that were considered so traumatic that we make memes about them and joke about the dog death toll in Newberry Award winning books. I think that type of fictional trauma, as a practice run for kids who probably haven't experienced death in any significant way, or as catharsis and validation for those who have, is important.

But today there seem to be a substantial number of young people—not children, primarily, but younger adults—who don't want to encounter anything difficult or unexpected in fiction. Which, I get, the world is harsh and maybe you use fiction to escape, but they then extend it to "no one, and especially not children, should read these things." Or everything needs to be labelled clearly so that you can work yourself up to engaging with the trauma.

I dunno, I just had a kid who mostly doesn't like to read burn through and write a fabulous response to Tanya Tagaq's Split Tooth. It's a very adult book, both in content and style. I warned her that it has a rape scene on like page 4 and gets darker from there, but she absolutely loved it and connected with it in ways that she doesn't with contemporary fiction for people her age. I don't wanna accidentally traumatize a kid, don't get me wrong, but I'm kind of grateful for having grown up in an era where no one gave a shit if kids read traumatic things.

[krait]

All those "the dog dies" books kind of provide an interesting additional layer of context, because so many of those were given to me as Good Important Literature... which was worlds away from the stuff I read for fun, which was mostly tropey fantasy novels. (With, as tropey fantasy novels in those days generally ran, plenty of rape scenes, dystopian setups, body horror, and '''problematic''' elements galore! But also meant to be escapist fun.)

I feel like there's probably something to be said for contexts - that what a kid might read in school and enjoy, with scholastic discussion and teacher support, might not be enjoyable for them to read alone. And vice-versa; I wouldn't have wanted to *discuss* cheap fantasy novel content with grownups! Part of the magic was that they were all for me, and whatever I got out of them didn't have to be shared. (For one thing, I had a strong suspicion that my mother would have taken them away if she knew exactly what was in them.)

I do think there's room for a divide, for people to be able to say "I may have to engage with this sometimes, but I don't want to do it in my free time that's supposed to be for fun," and that's fine. It's probably a good thing for young people to work out what they do and don't want, and be able to express it. Of course, the corollary to this is that they don't get to make the authors or the bookshop enforce your preference for them: it's your fun, not your class assignment, so there is no teacher screening things for you. If they want to control the content they encounter, they have to figure out how to screen things effectively.

Perhaps this is something classrooms could build into the curriculum in some fashion? Because I can see that having a sharp divide from "educational reading you have zero choice about reading" and "personal reading you have 100% choice about reading" could leave young people feeling unsure how to handle the choice part of the latter - if upsetting materials are mandatory, how do you learn to make decisions about whether you want to read those things?

On the other hand, I read all kinds of 'disturbing' content, from Newberry Medal animal deaths to schlock fantasy to Readers Digest accounts of true crime to collections of horror myths, and never came off worse than spending a week being terrified to go to sleep because of vampires, so maybe I'm overthinking things. :P

[sabotabby]

Really excellent points.

I think part of the issue is structural. There was no internet when I was a kid. So I found books by going into the library where my mom worked and when I got bored of the children's section, pulling things off the shelf that had a dragon or a spaceship on the cover. And later on taking advice from some of her boyfriends, who had interesting ideas about what was appropriate for children.

(Try telling any adult now that it was absolutely fine for my mom's boyfriend to give me old copies of Playboy as a tween. For the short stories. Because I got really into Beat literature and that was wear it was published. But I will die on the hill that it actually was fine.)

There's definitely a distinction between reading for school and reading for pleasure. The problem being, of course, that children are increasingly surveilled in a way that I wasn't, and not expected to be able to manage the latter on their own. I'm trying to build those skills by giving them a wide variety of literature to choose from and including trigger warnings.

That said, controversially, I think it was healthier for me as a child to be shocked by things, and saddened, and horrified, and I have the kind of brain that responds the opposite of the way that trigger warnings are intended to work. And it was maybe good for me to have certain reading materials forced on me that I wouldn't have read on my own. I don't universalize my experience to all kids—I was unusually interested in reading and writing, and I got stuff out of the fiction that I hated that would have just turned another kid off—but. Diversity of tactics in education, I guess.