To say my DM was not unreasonable to let me read adult books aged 11?

[CraveThatRadox]

I adore reading and in school, was very natural at English and History. I actively spoke about these things and I've always been a very passionate person on topics of interest. When I look back, I owe this to my DM giving me grown up books.

I was in Year 6, so about 11 (I'm a September baby), when I stumbled upon her 'Pillars of The Earth' book.

I said "Oh what's this about?". I was given a rough idea but couldn't stop asking. She then said "read it, if you like. It's quite dense though".

I did read it. I couldn't put the thing down. I had read the whole thing within two weeks or so. I brought it to school to read during reading time once, and it got confiscated

I remember being fascinated by the phrase " afterwards ,when he was spent" in Barbara Cartland books. I was sure I knew what it meant

Whereas I was totally bamboozled by the phrase "love making" in books like Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon, Little Women, etc.

Emily in particular was always off in a moon-flooded garden "love making" with her paramours.

I can remember thinking, "Christ, these Victorian ladies were a bit FORWARD, weren't they? She's only just been introduced to that bloke."

I was always allowed to read anything I wanted without any censorship and I've let my DC do the same.

My DH has a story about how back in the 70s he'd outgrown the children's section in the local village library but the librarian wouldn't allow him to use the adults' section. He'd probably have been about 10 or 11 at the time. His mother, who was a teacher, went to the library & had a word with the librarian telling her it was ridiculous to limit an advanced reader to the children's section. Faced with my formidable MIL the librarian backed down.

My grandmother used to use the phrase love making instead of flirting- my sister and I used to cry laughing

Do people feel that there should be no age restrictions on films either?

Personally, I think there's a huge difference between a film/video game, where image is imposed on the viewer in the way the director has chosen, and a book, where the reader can picture it in whatever way they want or indeed choose not to picture it at all. Two directors could take the same script and one could produce a version that would be rated 18 and the other could produce a version rated PG with exactly the same dialogue and stage directions - but if you gave that same script to someone to read, they'd form their own version in their head that might be the 18 rated version or the PG rated version or somewhere in between. Reading is just a completely different experience, psychologically, to watching a film and its impacts are very different too.

I'm not saying that parents who are worried about this sort of thing don't have every right to restrict their child's reading if they want to, or that they are 'wrong' as such - it's clearly up to them. But I don't think parents who do let their kids read adult books are in any way wrong or unreasonable either, and I'm incredibly grateful to my own parents that they took this stance (and it's worth pointing out that they weren't your lax, hippy-dippy 70s let-them-do-whatever-they-like type parents at all - they were really strict about a lot of things).

My grandmother used to use the phrase love making instead of flirting- my sister and I used to cry laughinggrin

That's what it used to mean.

Unless Anne Shirley really was rogering Gilbert Blythe stupid in haystacks all over Prince Edward Island.

I was reading adult books at nine and ten years old. I used to read a lot of my dad's sci-fi and spy novels, and I definitely read Stephen King at about ten years old, know I read Flowers in the Attic around that time too, and had even read Pushkin's short stories (cos my DGM had them all on her bookshelf).

Looking back though, I was young at a time when a lot of children/young adult fiction was pretty disturbing anyway: Z for Zacariah, Children of the Dust, all those post-nuclear war novels, plus Nicholas Fisk's sci-fi stuff.

By contrast, Harry Potter comes across as very mild indeed.

To be honest, I don't really see the problem with it. Very few books feature as much graphic violence as films do these days. There's also not a lot of sex in many adult novels, and the sex there is is not as male-gazey as films can be.

I am hoping fingers crossed that one day in the far future, my currently very tiny DD will "discover" all my graphic novels. The day I find her reading the Sandman series will be the day I do one of those secret smiles and give the air a little fist bump.

My parents never really put very many restrictions on what I read or watched really! They would always just say, if I wasn't sure about something or didn't understand to ask them.

I remember picking up Stephen kings rose madder from a box in the garage at about 10/11 it was summer holidays before starting year 6 and I'm a September bday. I did ask can I read this and my dad did say yes, but didn't actually look at what it was. I was half way through before they actually realised. And then my mum just said, if you like it I've got more of his books somewhere, I'll find them for you.

The only time I was told to stop reading something, was aged about 5, when I started reading a sexual health leaflet out loud in the doctors waiting room to my dad!

I too was a very advanced reader in a family of bookworms.

I certainly don't remember being told things weren't appropriate. I read jacki Collins, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Virginia Andrews, Jilly Cooper, Judith Krantz, James Herbert etc by the time I was 11 or 12. More or less got the sex references ( difficult not to in Jackie Collins, she didn't muck about!)

And I'm fine.

YANBU. My reading was censored as a teen (wrongly in my view), and I don't plan to do the same to my children (in fact I will be keeping my fingers crossed that they both turn out to be readers unlike their Dad)

I was never censored. I had an advanced reading and was considered mature, although DM occasionally warned me if she thought something would be heavy going. The only things she stopped me reading were Jackie Collins/Mills and Boon/Barbara Cartland, because she thought Jilly Cooper was better .

No one turned a hair when I started on crime novels and Jilly at 12 or so!

I remember finding a children's book we were forced to read on school really disturbing. It was a gritty mid 70s tale of neglected kids in my city and I recognised the street names.

A girl after my own heart, Oakum! I re-bought the whole Sandman collection when I got together with DH (stbxh took out shared collection with him ) and I cannot wait for DD to be old enough to discover them! Think I'll keep Preacher on the top shelf til she's a bit older, though!

I would echo a previous poster and say my parents were very strict about other stuff, mainly behaviour and looking reasonably clean and tidy. They just never thought to micromanage.

I was allowed to read anything I picked up, pretty much! I tried reading Wilt when I was about 11 but found it boring as I didn't know what one of the key words meant and couldn't find it in a dictionary.

It was "cunt".

Oooh I used to scour the dictionary.

I remember being on holiday out of TV reception range when I was 10 or 11 and running out of books to read so I started in on my mother's library books. You could argue that exposing a child to Issac Bashevis Singer and Chaim Potok at that age was a bad thing, but I do years later I did my first degree in the study of religions.

I always used to read her books, the legacy of bad 1970's TV in NZ and a really fast reading speed.

None Yeah, maybe Preacher is a bit much for a ten year old.

But a lot of adult sci-fi and fantasy contains some fascinating ideas that make complex subjects very accessible for a younger person. The sandman series, for example, has a lot of mythological content.

Again, I still maintain that one of the easiest ways to understand imperial resource wars in developing countries and how this intersects with religion among the indigenous people is to read Frank Herbert's Dune.

It's similar to the way Gormenghast shows how bureaucracy and ritual in a state can cause the state to ossify to the point it's ripe for subversion.

To be honest, I've read all of GRRM's the Song of Ice and Fire novels out so far, and I can't actually think of any scenes that made me raise my eyebrows in terms of sexual content or violence. The show, however, is rather different.

The only novels I would have an issue about my DD reading before the age of 16 are probably some of those written by Clive Barker, but that is because some of his work contains rather strong BDSM themes.

I had no restrictions on my reading material either - I was a very advanced reader and read all sorts of things as a child. The only books she didn't let me read when I picked them up in her bedroom one day were the Flowers in the Attic books by Virginia Andrews.

My eldest (G&T reader) reads prolifically and had already read most of the Roald Dahl books before she started in Y1 at school. It's been quite hard to select books for her that are suitable for her actual age rather than her reading age. She's 9 at the moment but reading age of 16/17 according to her teachers. I've been giving her books that I enjoyed at her age - some children's books, others not as much. Things like Joan Aiken stories, classics like Heidi, Wizard of Oz, White Fang (which she didn't like because of the way the dogs were treated). Then things like the Helen Forester autobiographical series, Moby Dick etc. She struggles a little with some of the older classics because of the language but enjoys the stories on the whole.

In terms of reading books with sex scenes in, I'd probably wait until she's 11/12 I think because she's still quite young for that, although maybe getting curious about things as she's been asking a few questions!

I don't remember there being as much young adult fiction when I was young (I'm 32) apart from Point horror type stuff, which is much tamer than The Hunger Games or the Gone series

I read what I wanted from a similar age to you, including Stephen king and similar. It never gave me nightmares or anything. Nor did it affect my behaviour in real life

Oh, and I read the entire (well, first 4 as the others took another decade to be released) series of Earth's Children books (Clan of the Cave Bear) when I was 12 - and there are a LOT of sex scenes in those! It wouldn't have occurred to my mum to check what I was reading though, as we didn't like the same genres. She gave me a couple of James Herbert books to read when I was about the same age but I hate horror!

Have you tried Wizard of Earthsea nobody?

Even if you accept that it's fine for children to read adult books, why are we always talking about horror and stuff with loads of sex in them?

I had precocious, prolific readers and there's plenty to read without introducing them to Pennywise at 9.

I wouldn't say I was an especially advanced reader, but I was a voracious reader when I was young. I started reading more adult books at around 12 or 13, I think - all my mum's friends would give me books after they'd read them so I read a lot of Jackie Collins-type stuff as well as more difficult/literary works.

My parents never policed what I read, even though they were quite strict (IMO now, sometimes unreasonably so) about other stuff such as curfews, films/tv, etc. Neither my mum nor my dad are big readers, but they did see reading as a 'good' thing to do, if that makes sense. Quite honestly I don't think it ever entered their heads that books could be unsuitable.

Other people evidently disagreed with this - I took a box of books from my nan's attic one time and I remember my aunt was horrified that I was going to read the Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth. I think I was around 15 and she thought it was way too heavy for me. To be honest, I still don't really understand why she was so perturbed.

I got Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov for Christmas when I was about 16, though I might have been 17. A friend from school borrowed it, but brought it back the next day rather sheepishly saying she wasn't allowed to read it! I thought at the time that was ridiculous, but in hindsight I can see why they felt uncomfortable with it. I do wonder what they thought of my parents though

My parents let me read what I liked because they had no idea what I was actually reading. They were well educated scientists but as far as reading for pleasure went they liked Agatha Christie... They had all the classics in beautiful (though impractically enormous) compilation volumes with uncut pages... We lived in the middle of nowhere and there wasn't much to do, so I read Lady Charley's Lover and Madam Bovary and The Rainbow at 11 - I'm pretty sure nobody's read the editions on my parents shelves since, and certainly they hadn't been read before I read them as it was obvious they were pristine with some pages needing cutting.

I'm not sure it was "good" parenting to let me read those books as they weren't making an informed decision!

Those risque classics did me no harm but there is much easier access to absolutely twisted stuff now. There is so much rape and abuse in Game of Thrones, and has anyone read Otherland? There is some really sick, disturbing stuff much more easily available now than when we were kids. Consentual sex - fine, doesn't need censorship, but rape,gang rape, rape, torture and murder of children - do you really think it's good to freely let an 11 year old read graphic description of that?

A genuinely good reader will vividly imagine what they read and it will stay with them far more intensely than a film, so I'm always surprised people seem convinced that it's wrong to Stearns even very young children away from content which would be very clearly 18 rated on screen, and is non consentual.

*steer not Stearns