Editor Laura Simeon writes about determining whether a children's or YA book is "appropriate" or "inappropriate" for a certain age:
What Makes a Book Age-Appropriate?Current "battles over so-called 'inappropriate' content in kids’ and teen books" can lead to situations where "school librarians nationwide report that some administrators are incorrectly treating these age recommendations as prescriptive and using them to craft policies that override the expertise of library professionals and limit students’ access to books." But determining which readers certain books are suitable for isn't that straightforward.
Do age guidelines for reading materials refer to vocabulary and sentence complexity or to content? The two criteria don't necessarily align. Simeon points out that a child with advanced literacy skills might be able to read a particular novel's text fluently but not be developmentally ready for the themes it includes or the way it deals with them. Her essay offers several examples of 2022 books that cover potentially sensitive topics (e.g., divorce, mental illness) in ways suitable for middle-school and YA readers, respectively. Conversely, I could mention numerous classic novels with stories fully accessible to preteen readers but with vocabulary and style that could prove challenging for some contemporary twelve-year-olds—for instance, THE SECRET GARDEN, especially the Yorkshire dialect passages.
Simeon lists issues that trouble people who want to restrict students' access to the "wrong" or "inappropriate" books, among them the fear that kids might "lose a romanticized notion of childhood innocence." It is to laugh. The only people who believe in the "innocence" of childhood are adults who've forgotten large portions of their own childhoods. When James Barrie calls children "innocent" in PETER PAN, he couples that adjective with "heartless." It has often baffled me when would-be censors object to having child readers exposed in fiction to phenomena they're almost certainly aware of in reality. "Books can be upsetting and confusing," Simeon acknowledges, "but so can real life. Unlike real life, readers can skim, skip, take breaks, and walk away."
Anyway, age range recommendations for books, like genre categories, are marketing tools. Their chief purpose is to help booksellers and librarians decide where to shelve things. C. S. Lewis says somewhere that any book worth reading at age eight (aside from "books of information") is equally worth reading at any age. I first encountered many of my favorite children's and YA authors in adulthood. I have a vague memory of reading a couple of the Narnia novels in elementary school, but I tracked down the entire series only in my twenties. I've reread them over and over since then. I'd never heard of the Winnie the Pooh stories until my high-school Latin teacher read us a chapter every Friday (while we passed around WINNIE ILLE PU).
My own policy about children and books, based on my own prodigious quantity of "inappropriate" reading from about age eight on, has always been that their reading shouldn't be censored. If they stumble upon a literary work and find it interesting, let them tackle it. If they come across passages "over their heads," they'll be either bored or repelled and will simply skim or skip. As for the few books I owned that I flatly didn't want my underage offspring to read, I kept them securely stowed where the kids didn't know they existed.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
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