I imagine the librarian was acting on a supposed (imagined) community standard about what parents want their kids reading-- maturity as well as difficulty.
Agree with AEH-- my kids really do put books they encounter down if the content is beyond what they want to process emotionally right then. I imagine that not all kids do, so those families might need explicit rules. We haven't needed them.
(And I would despair of enforcing that sort of rules around here in any case... the kids will read what they find...)
Precisely.
DD is quite imaginative, but "disturbing themes" don't really bother her all that viscerally-- beyond what she is already thinking about, I mean. If she is already thinking about what it means to be dispossessed, homeless, or unloved-- well, then, she's not going to be MORE traumatized by reading about it.
I'm a strong believer in bibliotherapy on some level, though, so there is that. Aeh and Dee Dee's posts sum up my feelings here.
I'm so glad that our local librarians never took this kind of stance with my DD.
