No, no, no! I cannot believe what I'm hearing.
Publishers plan to introduce age limits on books, backed by 86% of parents? This is insane.
Publishers see it as a marketing tool to help people buying books for children to choose something suitable.
The fact that 40% said they'd buy more books as a result is probably a fairly significant part of that.
And a government minister has said he thinks it's a jolly good idea.
However, I remember... children react to this sort of thing.
"Stories for 7-year olds" and the like were rather popular when I was growing up, and I felt a bit guilty reading stories for 8-year olds when I was 7 because they might be bad for me in some way, too gory or something, and as for reading stories for 6-year olds - far too juvenile, surely...
But as well as this sort of eccentricity, I was a precocious reader and devoured everything I could get hold of.
No one is clear what the suitability criteria will be judged on either.
I named my brother when I was 2 years old... happily my parents liked the name. The books I chose the name from ("Topsy and Tim") are now in the pre-school section of bookshops, aimed at children older than I was when I read them. Should I not let my son read them now (ok, chew them now)?
From age 6 I loved Enid Blyton's Secret Seven and Famous Five although they were misogynistic, racist and everything else because they were rollicking adventure stories. I really don't know how to classify them.
At 6 and 7 I loved a book called "Five Dolls in a house" but was a bit scared by the story of the doll that got lost. I also loved "Totty: the story of a dolls house" but I didn't like the bit where Marchpane the wax doll caught fire and melted.
I loved the Chronicles of Narnia, even if I was scared by them as a child (and I was scared by bits of the Harry Potter series as an adult). Should these be for over 11s only becuase they are gory and scary?
I read "Forever" by Judy Blume at 11 and like every other 11-year old I thought the dirty bits were fascinating even though I had no idea what VD was. Should I not have read that then?
Who gets to decide?
And then there are authors read by adults, teenagers and children alike, Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, JK Rowling. What's going to happen to their books?
If Harry Potter is marked 6 years and up, for example, might older kids go "it's not for me, it's for babies"? Are you sure?
Reading is a window to another world. The pictures in our head are always better than the film version. It's something to enjoy, to love, to excite us, to relax us, to inspire us, to get us thinking about things outside our everyday existence and our experience of the world.
Literacy hours and that kind of thing sound like a good idea. But some of their effect has been to make reading a chore, a feat of understanding the phonics rather than exploring the beauty and pattern of the words.
I also understand that - like film classification - there's an argument that could be made about protecting children. I just worry that we always go for the most nanny state-ish solution...
Like the how-much-alcohol-a-child-at-home-can-drink information that's being put out at the moment. In the UK it's illegal for children under 5 to drink alcohol at home, illegal for them to drink it in restaurants with a meal under 16, and illegal for them to buy it themselves until they are 18.
The new guidance is to say how much alcohol parents can give children over 5 at home, very specifically. This is because some uncaring, idiotic parents are just letting their children drink what they want to at home, binge drinking, drinking to get drunk etc., even buying them alcohol specifically.
Sensible parents let their kids try alcohol, for example wine at Sunday lunch. This is normal in France for example, where sometimes parents even give their kids their own glass of wine mixed with water (we tried this on holiday in France when I was little - it was so horrible it put us off alcohol for quite some time).
The point is that that way there's no mystique - alcohol is something boring that parents have, not something exciting and grown up. But I don't want to be told how to do it by a leaflet from the Department of Children, Schools and the Family. This is our private sphere, and I already feel like there's a lot of unnecessarily intrusive policing of good families in the name of catching or helping those that are struggling.
But back to books. I understand that for films there are images conjured up by adult minds that are not suitable for children's minds. But books don't really work like that - the images we build are our own and if we don't understand and we're too young, our minds have an astonishing capacity to just blip right over those bits. Like the VD bit in "Forever".
And sometimes it's good to let children who are ready ask questions. It spares parents the embarassment of having to raise these issues with children without a natural stimulus for discussion.
Look, I know this one's been conjured up by the publishers, but the point is the same.
Parental responsibility.
It can't always be outside sources that govern our relationships with each other, especially within the family.
It's for parents to exercise a bit of responsibility, to care for their kids, care about what they are reading and find out about the books that are available and their own view of suitability.
I can understand that printing age limits on books might give them some guidance but they need to remember that it's guidance, not a rule, and that they need to think about whether their kids are able to read more widely and want to have their minds stimulated and continue to provide them with those opportunities.
Then may be they'll be able to think for themselves.
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