The Twilight Saga, or Why We Keep Trying to Censor what Teens Read

In carpool a couple of weeks ago, a fourth-grade girl I've come to think of as a surrogate daughter, mentioned that her mom didn't want her to read Twilight, the teen vampire love story that's been such a huge publishing success and will soon hit the big screen.

“Oh, my son Tomas read that,” I told her, and “I read it too while I was recovering from a bad fall.” (And I didn't feel capable of reading anything too complicated, I thought to myself, but I didn't say that out loud.) “There's nothing bad in it,” I said to her, "and if you want me to tell your mom that I've read it and that I think it's okay for you to read, I can do that,” I promised her.

“Oh, could you?” she asked hopefully. “I told her I'd rather read Twilight than get my own cell phone and that tells you how much it means to me.”

“It sure does,” I laughed, and then I started thinking to myself about the perennial question of why we as parents get so worried about what our kids read that we want to censor certain books.

So I started asking people – okay, other moms--what they thought about Twilight. [If I'd asked any dads, they would mostly likely have give me blank stares, but that's another blog topic.)

My sister told me that the book was a source of controversy at her daughter's Christian school. I found out that the mom of my would-be-Twilight-reader wasn't nearly as worried about the book as her college-aged daughter was because her oldest daughter thought that the heroine wasn't a “good role model.” “What I think really upsets her,” my friend told me, “is that wanting to read this book shows that her little sister is growing up too fast.”

After all Twilight does touch on all those adolescent issues that raise parental (and big sister) hackles: falling in love, wondering about sex, having relationships (platonic or otherwise) behind a parent's back, having your daughter getting involved with wrong kid of guy (where “vampire” stands in for any race/class/religion/or other difference that makes you uncomfortable).

For my friend's older daughter, Twilight also seemed to send the wrong kind of message to her little sister: in it the heroine spends a lot time wondering if she's good enough for the guy; he tends to be controlling, even bullying on occasion, and his outrageous good looks, material wealth, and “I know more than you do, little girl” attitude isn't quite enough to offset his equally out-sized angst about how he might endanger her or even worse give in to the temptation to turn her into a vampire like himself.

But the real question that lingers for me about the Twilight phenomenon isn't so much about whether it's a “good” book or a “bad” book, but why we worry so much about what adolescents, and especially adolescent girls, read.

I'd be the first to admit that I share my friend's oldest daughter's concern about her little sister reading books that start to erode the boundaries of childhood. There are good reasons for having “children's sections” in public libraries in order to provide a rich, age-appropriate environment in which young people can begin to explore their world, including its darker sides.

Yet children's books like Holes, Are you there God? It's me, Margaret?, and Bud, Not Buddy treat topics that a generation earlier we might not have considered “safe” for children: including abuse, abandonment, puberty, and the juvenile justice system. However, the authors of these same books write about these experiences in a way that children and adults can understand without being psychically threatened by them.

One of the hardest transitions we experience as parents is watching our children move from the relative innocence and wonder of childhood to the increased worldliness and skepticism that they begin to feel as young adults. If there's anyone I identified with in Twilight it was the well-meaning but easily fooled father who has no idea what's going on in his daughter's head or taking place in her bedroom where a vampire spends most evenings watching her sleep and trying to protect her from other vampires.

Perhaps what bothers parents most about what their teens are reading is this realization that we can no longer fully protect our children from the world and all its dangers.

In a strange way, it may seem more feasible to us keep our children safe from the fictional dangers contained in the pages of a book than to have to face our own limitations in keeping them safe from the world at large. Censorship can seem to offer a certain comfort to a parent, even if we're just like the father in Twilight, futilely trying to ward off threats we can't even see.

As the mother of three sons, two of whom are over the age of fifteen, I confess I've largely ceded the battle of trying to protect my adolescent children from any and all “negative” influences of media, video, books, music, pop culture, and their peers. I also have to confess that I might be a little less laissez-faire if I had a daughter. I just don't know what difference gender might make.

But what I have realized is that all I can really do at this stage of children's lives is to give them the skills to ask questions about what they hear, what they watch, and what they read.

They're going to read what they want, not necessarily what I want them to read. But I also know that if I'm willing to take the time to read some of the same books, we can at least start a conversation, even an argument, about what those books mean and why we value them differently. And that's one good way to recognize their passage to young adulthood.

For more good discussions of Twilight, see The Christian Science Monitor's "Chapter & Verse Blog," "I Don't Want my Kid Reading that Book"

http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2008/11/15/i-dont-want-my-kid-reading-that-book/