My kid loves to read, and I am so thankful for it. I loved to read as a child, and we had plenty of books in our home library to keep up with this love. Our school had a library hour, and we got to take books home for the week. I remember one summer, we visited a second-hand bookshop where we bought books for cheap, and once we read them, we sold the books back and replaced them with the next set of books to read.
As a kid growing up in India, the famous Enid Blyton books were the most popular ones we read growing up, and I wanted my kid to experience it. So, here she is, making her way through this beautiful series of books. And this is a stack of books that she read within the last three months.
Here is a question for you – How do you determine what a good book is if you have not read it? The answer is – You either trust that your kid will point out something that is not right, or you read the book yourself. Now, who has time to read all the books our kids want to read? Not me for sure. But I did have an experience that made me rethink that. We bought the entire series of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid last Christmas. These are highly reviewed books, and we bought them based on those reviews. One day my kid asked me what the meaning of ‘jerk’ was. It is not a word we use at home or would want our kids to call others. I then learned that she read it from one of those books. After skimming it, I was not comfortable with the content. The kid in this book writes his diary with attitude, and there are references to the bullying culture in schools which I did not want to expose my kid to in this way. So, that was the end of that book series.
There are so many good books written that we can choose for our kids, and it is ok to pass up a highly reviewed book if it does not meet your MOM standards (yes, there is such a thing). Needless to say, I will be taking the time to skim books that I have not read to make sure my kid is reading literature with good content that also aligns with the kind of values I want my kid to have.
(Disclaimer: I have not read all the books, but from skimming a couple of them, it made me uncomfortable enough to make that choice for my kid. It was a very personal decision, and you do not have to agree with mine, and that is ok too.)
