Safe For Kids: Why It's A Bad Library Standard
It’s no secret that the most common reason people cite for wanting to remove materials from the library has to do with materials being inappropriate for kids.
Which, you know, isn’t unfair at times.
I thought it was high time that we talked about why something being inappropriate for a child is not a good argument to make when it comes to removing items.
We can keep this pretty brief, right? Right?!
Safety Not Guaranteed
Library collections can’t be built with a safety mindset, one that says, “But what if this is upsetting to someone?”
And before you even start, I say the same thing to namby pamby liberals, who may not want a book by someone accused of sexual assault in the library, that I’m saying to you…pamby namby(?) conservatives who don’t want, I don’t know, drag queen books? Are we still on about that? Have we not gotten over that yet?
Removing a book because it may, hypothetically, trigger bad feelings in someone is not necessarily a reasonable thing to do. It would put libraries and communities in the position of deciding which fears or feelings were rational and which were not, and NEWSFLASH: Feelings are not rational, they’re feelings, so there’s no codified, objective way to do this. It’d basically end up a hodgepodge, podgehodge mess of weird-ass things that we did and didn’t allow until the system collapsed under its own weight and someone said, “Fuck it, let’s just go back to letting people be upset now and again.
And to that someone would probably say, “Hear hear, but did you have to use the F-word?”
And that first guy would say, “Well, I figured I’d set the tone for offensive materials by dropping an F-er in there.”
Guaranteeing access to relevant, desired, useful materials is the library’s job. Guaranteeing the way those materials will be received by all is not.
The Library Is For Everyone, and Some of Everyone Is Adults
Wow, that’s my new record for worst subheading. Take THAT, “OTHER STUFF I THOUGHT ABOUT THIS ONE TIME.”
“All-ages” is a term that I sometimes go back and forth about with staff planning events. Because they might say it’s “all-ages,” but it’s really for kids.
Think about it like this: How happy would we be if all movies and TV had to be all-ages?
Turn off the cookstove, Breaking Bad.
You’ve sung your final note, Sopranos.
Game Over, Game of Thrones.
Mission: Impossible-est.
Demolition Man? More like Demolitioning That Film Reel, Buster!
In order for something to be all-ages, it has to be for kids. Because when you make something for all ages, that means it has to work for the person with the lowest bar. Kids have the least experience in the world, they have the most restrictions on their behavior, and they aren’t always equipped to make their own choices.
Sure, all-ages stuff isn’t inappropriate for adults, with the exception of some of those Cars sequels where, fuck that shit, but it’s not stimulating or interesting, either. It doesn’t provide personal development for all ages.
If a library is suited to kids, designed to protect their innocence or whatever, it becomes functionally useless for adults. An all-ages library is not helpful in developing humans beyond the capacity of children.
Am I saying kids are dumb, so if everything in the library is for kids, we’ll all be dumb.
Sure. Why not? It’s about time this newsletter went viral, and if I have to say kids are dumb to get there, let’s roll.
Let’s Reorient This: “It’s not appropriate for my child today.”
Yep, lots of what exists in the world is not appropriate for your child.
Your child today.
Your child, assuming they aren’t among the stupidest of children who do things like getting run over by slow-driving steamrollers, or that they weren’t born to the stupidest of parents who think government dorks have recommended too many vaccines and will therefore die of diseases that haven’t Americans since fucking cowboy days—provided your kid is like 90-some percent of other kids, your kid will grow to be an adult.
And when your child is an adult, what’s appropriate for them will change.
While things in the library might be inappropriate for your child today, there are lots of us (I daresay all of us) who are former children, and we’ve grown, and we’re ready for more mature things. Our parents are HAPPY that we’ve moved on from reading Wimpy Kid books, or, at least, that we’re reading other things in addition to Wimpy Kid books while still keeping up with our ol’ buddy Greg and his hilarious (honestly, my personal favorite) buddy Rowley.
If you want your kids to have a good life while they’re kids, you have a lot of control over that.
If you want your kids to continue to have good lives as they age, they need access to things you might not have given them access to as kids.
The kids of today are the adults of tomorrow.
DAMN that’s good. I’m going to be blurbing ALA publications in no time.
A Series of Filters
You should think about the world in terms of a series of filters, filters that you can adjust and fine tune to work exactly as you’d like.
The library, as a whole, should be considered pretty unfiltered for your kids. It’s pre-filter. You don’t want your kids to drink the library’s water without maybe boiling it a little first.
Er, the water from a library fountain should be fine. This is just a metaphor. Don’t paint me as saying the water in libraries is bad…unless, again, this would cause me to go viral. In which case, new headline for this newsletter: LIBRARY WATER FOUNTAINS INFESTED WITH GIARDIA THAT IS LEARNING BY READING THE BOOKS!?!??!??
Now, you can think of the sections in the library a bit as a filter. Not totally, not customized for you specifically, but you’re not getting muscle mommy Orc coffee shop owners getting sexy with customers in kids’ first chapter books.
“C’mon, sound it out. She prayed to C….C….CROM! She prayed to Crom that her savage lovemaking…”
As we move into the Teen section, these sections are less about content and more about intended audience, so Teen books might not be appropriate for YOUR teen, you need to work through them with some caution.
And once you hit the adult section, we’re back to unfiltered water, diarrhea madness, baby.
This metaphor was a terrible idea.
Here’s the thing: The main way to prevent your kids from drinking the unfiltered waters of the library is to FILTER THOSE WATERS for your kids, yourself, at home before you go the library by setting up clear rules, before you check out by sitting down and looking over selections with your kids, and by making it clear to your kids that if they’ve accidentally ingested something they shouldn’t have, it’s better for them to let you know so you can mitigate the issues together instead of trying to hide behind the curtains and shitting their pants, which was my move of choice as a kid and results in shitty pants, a shitted up child, and a need to replace living room curtains that’s far more frequent than even some of those HGTV maniacs would suggest.