Spoil the Child

(I am so getting lynched for that title.)

It has been my feeling, for some time, that children of the past 20-some years have been coddled.

Not that we've necessarily had it easy—but that their entertainment and media exposure has been watered down.

We have been Siddhartha's parents for too long. We have tried to protect children from basic facts of life, from unpleasantness that we see as somehow corrupting by the mere witnessing of it. We have watered down our fairy tales since the age of romanticism, and we have censored books we think are too bloody or morbid or harshly worded. We have produced children who are not challenged, who are not informed, who are not taught the basic disappointments of life; children who exist in bubbles, some of which may never burst.

I'm not saying speculative fiction is the light and the way as far as fixing this; but I am saying that children could damn well stand to be exposed to something a little darker than Arthur.

Which is why I am so pleased to see that Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book has been a Children's Bestseller for a year, and that the company it shares is, in many places, about the same shade of dark as Gaiman is.

It's not that I think that children should be allowed to read and watch whatever they want; certainly it requires a certain level of maturity to deal with some topics, and certainly there are topics that will be traumatic or just plain confusing if a child confronts them before they are ready. But let's let the kids make some of their own decisions. Let's treat our kids like little adults. Let's judge their maturity based on our knowledge of them, not some external rubric, and let's allow for the possibility that maybe our kids are ready to read about murder, or prostitution, or terrifying little monsters. Let's let 'em have a taste of the ugly stuff.