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"I'd much rather my daughter read something that might or might not be 'inappropriate' openly rather than lie about her age so she can read it in secret. If she's reading stuff with my tacit permission, she'll be far more likely to come to me to discuss it than if she's sneaking it behind my back. All the net.nanny software on the planet won't keep a motivated kid from reading whatever they want. Besides, all that so-called 'mature' content is the perfect teaching tool for any parent with the gumption to use it. Knowledge is always better than ignorance." -- tejas, 2007-11-30

And in a different subthread of the same comment thread:

"It matters to me that my child be able to explore and learn, even if it's [to] learn that not everything in the world is to her taste or that people often behave in ways that aren't particularly nice. Learning that early can help children stay out of trouble they might otherwise get into due to their own ignorance and naivete. Sheltering them beyond reason does no one any good and only caters to prudish adults who are too frightened of life to even talk about it to teach their own children.

"We can't child-proof the world, nor should we try. We need, instead, to be world-proofing our children."

-- tejas, 2007-11-30

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Whoa. I had to look to see who posted that to see whether it was me :) because I said something very similar recently, when I discovered that the Princess Diary book my precocious seven-year-old was reading was all about whether she should 'do it' with her boyfriend. As someone whose parents forbade her to read certain books, I know very well that it doesn't work, and I don't want to put her in a position where she's going to lie to me about it.

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Or, in the words of Dave Matuszek, "Censorship? I dont want my child exposed to *that*!"

tejas is mighty wise, whomever sie may be. Sure, I worry about my kids seeing things, and I can and do censor things from them; sometimes it's just best that they not be exposed to certain things until later. But I make that decision, and rarely do I say that they'll never see something under my roof.

In most cases, if they ask us a difficult question, we just ask back if they want to know the answer. They know from experience that we'll give them the exact answer, as best we can...and that's made them wary. Sometimes, they decide that they'd really rather not know now...

Yes; while I would much rather my kid not do anything behind my back, I would also much rather make sure that what s/he sees is not going to confuse him/her because s/he is too young to understand it, even with an explanation.

Case in point: we were all watching "Ninja Warrior" the other night. Perfectly harmless family entertainment. Until the post-op transsexual came on. It was perfectly obvious this had once been a man - the entire body with the exception of the breasts was very masculine. (& let's not kid ourselves that there is no masculine/feminine). But there were, indeed, breasts, long hair & a lot of make-up. A LOT of make-up. And, what's worse, when my daughter had said "Hey, there's a girl in this one!", my husband already said, "No,m I think that's a man." Whereupon we really had to explain it to PuppyBoy.

Now, I have no problem telling my kids anything & everything. But at 5 years old, there's no way in heck I want to tell him anything that has to do with the removal of a penis. He's rather fond of his, for some reason, & I'd rather not scare him w/the knowledge that it could conceivably come off in any fashion. So it was fortunate that I was able to skip over this in explaining that "Sometimes, there are boys or men who really feel that they should have been born girls, & so they decide to be women, & change their names & dress like women."

Not all censorship is bad, or even judgmental.

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Answering the question at an age appropriate level is not censorship. When my daughter asked if she could have a brother or a sister, I explained that for that to happen, a mom and a dad had to be living in the same house. Now, of course that is not strictly true. But for a four-year-old, which she was at the time, it was appropriate, and it stopped the line of questioning why Mommy and Daddy couldn't have more babies.

There's also the aspect of "Where do I come from?" and the parent takes a deep breath and explains all about making babies, in great detail, and then the kid looks puzzled and says, oh, because my friend said he was from Cleveland.

In other words, make sure you know what the kid is really asking -- and it sounds like you did that.

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