Are Young Readers Being Influenced by What They Read?

When I was a kid I liked to read stuff like If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, or when I was a teenager any of Brain Jacques’ books about talking animals in the land of Mossflower often captured my interest. But young adults are getting bombarded with less harmless reads in today’s current culture. Meghan Cox Gurdon is on the forefront of examining this topic as a Children’s Book Reviewer for The Wall Street Journal. On March 12, 2013, she delivered a speech to the Hillsdale College campus, which in turn was adapted into an article entitled “The Case for Good Taste in Children’s Books” for the Imprimis issue, a publication of Hillsdale College.

In Gurdon’s speech, she addresses the category of Young Adult (YA) literature as "becoming increasingly lurid, grotesque, profane, sexual, and ugly." She explains how this becomes a meta-message to children and young adults, condoned by adults, as what to expect in reality. Therefore, condoned bad taste in YA literature is taking a turn toward normalizing distorted portrayals of life leaving the reader feeling coarseness, emptiness, and sorrow as opposed to experiencing beauty, wisdom, and morality through good taste in book choices.

As I was reading this article on Meghan Cox Gurdon’s speech, I started to wonder what her opinion would be regarding the numerous books that seem to be influencing the Young Adult literature with their explicit content. Would she propose to banish them? Would she argue for more clean and moral depicting stories? How about the authors? Would she demand they stop writing? I discovered what she proposed to be rather reasonable. Her stance goes like this: “I do not, in fact, wish to ban any books or frighten any authors.”

“What I do wish is that people in the book business would exercise better taste; that adult authors would not simply validate every spasm of the teen experience; and that our culture was not marching toward ever-greater explicitness in depictions of sex and violence.” She refers to content from three different books to support her opinion that YA literature is full of these depictions: The Marbury Lens, by Andrew Smith, Rage by Jackie Morse Kessler, and Anatomy of a Boyfriend by Daria Snadowsky.

While Gurdon admits near the end of her speech that books she supports like Hansel and Gretel, Beowulf, and the story of David and Goliath, have gruesome and scary depictions, she argues they have a redeeming quality that is uplifting and transforms the scene of violence into something beautiful. Whereas, on the contrary she states: “the problem with darker offerings in Young Adult literature is that they lack this transforming and uplifting quality. They take difficult subjects and wallow in them in a gluttonous way; they show an orgiastic lack of restraint that is the mark of bad taste.”  This appears to be a brutal attack against the very authors Gurdon said she didn’t want to frighten, but it isn’t. Instead, it’s an argument vocalizing how counter intuitive it is for adults, whether parents or authors, to condone this sort of bad taste in YA literature. Gurdon parallels this kind of approval to anti-drug and anti-tobacco programs in elementary and middle schools. While kids take in the message that drugs and tobacco are bad, they see the meta-message that their expected by adults to use drugs and tobacco. The correlation is a meta-message in YA literature that, Gurdon, claims normalizes violence, sex, and abuse to be expected in the young adult’s life or friends lives.

Admittedly, Gurdon agrees with her critic Sherman Alexie who wrote a rebuttal to Gurdon’s twitter article that started Gurdon’s radical disproval of  “dark content” in Young Adult literature, asking her “does she (Gurdon) believe that a YA novel about murder and rape will somehow shock a teenager whose life has been damaged by murder and rape? Does she believe a dystopian novel will frighten a kid who already lives in hell?” I respect Gurdon’s honesty to include the opposing view point and agree with it. But after agreeing with him, Gurdon takes it a step further by stating: “I also don’t believe that the vast majority of 12-to-18-year-olds are living in hell. And as for those who are, does it really serve them to give them more torment and sulphur in the stories they read?”

This remark settled the matter for me. The way I see it, if an author’s reason for depicting explicit and detailed descriptions of sex, abuse, and violence in books oriented toward 12-to-18-year-olds, is because the minority of teenagers experienced this in reality, then what does that say about justification and validation? Should we also justify all “darkness” in the world and try to normalize it because the minority experiences this “darkness”? It’s like trying to justify abortion for all people because the minority of some unfortunately experience rape. What message does this send to those young adults who have a good life and free will? If they or their friends experience abuse, then does that mean abuse is okay, because well, it’s a social norm, at least in literature? What about sex? Just because sex is normal in books, does that now mean it’s okay to experience it at a young, developing, immature age? 

Gurdon expresses the idea that adults should exercise judgment when it comes to deciding what children and young adults read, because if children have ultimate reign over what they read, why does adult judgment in every other area of life suddenly vaporize as soon as it comes into contact with printed word? I don’t think that adults should be a gatekeeper into the realm of literature, but neither should they omit all judgment leaving a developing young mind to see the world through a distorted lens of graphic violence, sex, and abuse. Therefore an adult’s stance should reflect one that has the child’s best interests in mind. A perspective Gurdon shares, which is why she concludes her speech by quoting Saint Paul the Apostle out of Philippians 4:8 “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praise worthy—think about such things.” And then goes on to say: “And let us think about these words when we go shopping for books for our children.”

I think this sums up her speech and this adapted article quite eloquently. How can a child or young adult be thinking about anything excellent or praise worthy if the content of the book has no redeeming qualities, only a wallowing grotesque denigration of reality? What Gurdon and I now ask, is not that author’s stop writing, but that they would exercise better taste of virtue and life in their stories. They should give their readers a book that’s uplifting and full of beauty, and less full of sallow hope and gruesome imagery.