Sunday, September 04, 2005

Question for parents of teens

Today I'm asking for help from all you parents of teens - and I'd love to hear from the teens as well. Our goal with Wands and Worlds is to be a resource for information about fantasy and science fiction for children and teens up to about age 16. However, since I'm not the parent of a teen yet (David is 10), I have a little difficulty in providing guidance about appropriate content for teen readers.

It's important that you understand that I'm not talking about censorship here. I don't believe in censorship, and I think that, as has been mentioned in the comments for a different post, most teens are going to read what they want to anyway. Each parent has to decide if they will try to restrict what their teen reads, and I don't want to get into that.

What I do want to talk about is comfort level. To make this easier, let's use the movie ratings system as a basis for discussion. Parents: at what age would you be comfortable recommending an 'R' rated book to your teen? And teens, are you fully comfortable reading books with adult subjects like sex, murder, extreme violence? (Frankly, I have difficulty with some books that are excessively violent!) If so, at what age did you start reading such books?

Please use the comments link below to express your views. Thanks!

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