These objections are based on an imagined state of childhood in which all children live in a safe little bubble which does not burst until some sort of maturity threshold has been reached. One child’s distress may come from learning about the world, but another may experience instead a sudden glimmer of self-recognition. Not everyone gets to dodge life’s ugliness until they are old enough to vote. The fact that a child may not fully understand a narrative doesn’t mean that they are unable to derive any benefit from it, and frankly if your image of children is still so flat and unnuanced, you have not matured nearly as much as you think you have.
“giving a coming of age story to a child who isn’t coming of age yet will just distress and confuse them” girl . help girl children should not be exposed to anything they haven’t already experienced in life lest it give them something to think about or perhaps even feel about
“children who haven’t come of age shouldn’t read coming of age stories” bestie the runaway bunny is a coming of age story. Where the wild things are is a coming of age story. Bread and jam for frances is a coming of age story. A coming of age story is any story in which a child/adolescent/young adult changes in some way and learns a lesson about life, like????? What in the everloving fuck do you think a coming of age story IS???????
okay also like. The idea that something has to directly relate to your lived experience to have any value is so GROSS to me, it’s AWFUL, it is so completely fucking antithetical to what literature is supposed to BE!!!!!!!! I am the person i am because I read things that confused me and challenged me and scared me and unsettled me and made me stop and try to think about how the world feels to someone from a totally different time and place!!!!! What the FUCK!!!!!! I hate it here!!!!!!!
The second one… Babe, you read books in English class to analyze them, not to relate to them.
Being exposed to dark topics in books is also like… the best way to be exposed to dark topics as a kid. It’s in a safe environment. There’s an adult there who, assuming they’re a good teacher, will help work through those dark topics with the kids.
If the kid has already experienced trauma like what they read in the book irl, then it helps them understand that other people have gone through it, but that it’s not a good thing that they went through it. If the kid hasn’t experienced anything like that, then when they inevitably do, even if it’s not until they’re an adult, they have context and the ability to understand what happened better.
Books with dark topics are kinda like… practise for the real world, if that makes sense.
Also, the idea that in order for books/other media to have value they have to be personally relatable to whoever’s reading them in honestly baffling. If that was the case, nobody would ever make fantasy, sci-fi, etc. I read specifically to experience things I never do irl, and I know a lot of other people do too.
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