FYI (Twilight Edition)

To understand the popularity of Twilight, you need to understand 4 things:

1. - Adolescence is depressing and confusing

2- Teen girls are discouraged from being so unfeminine as to be depressed - ever, but when they are upset they tend towards mopey since being angry and violent and actually making people pay attention to them is even more discouraged

3 - YA books are mostly for girls not just because girls read more than boys, but because boys read adult (ie - violent) books earlier than girls do; this is mostly because girls parents freak out more when girls read adult (ie - sexually graphic) books than when boys do

4 - even teen girls tend to like the Twilight books less and less with each book (you just can't tell by the sales bc the overall sales keep growing with time)

*******

I do not think any of these things (with the exception of #4) is healthy. I don't think the way the Twilight series ended sounds even remotely interesting (which is why I haven't read the last book), much less healthy.

I do however find it extremely unsurprising that teen girls like this series. I also think that anyone that is upset by the popularity of this series by itself (as opposed to culture overall and are simply dissecting the Twilight series as part of something larger) needs to stop underestimating teen girls. Bella isn't blah because teen girls are okey dokey with heroines with no personality, Bella is blah because teen girls know that everyone else expects them to be blah - and they hate that, but they don't like disappointing people. Edward does stuff and Bella feels stuff, but never the twain shall meet, because together they make up one complete character. Not because women need men, but because Bella, who feels like half a person like many teen girls, needs an exciting alter ego who can do the stuff that she thinks she can't.

(Note that she spends the entire first book not just wanting to be with Edward, but to actually be Edward, or rather a vampire. In fact, she even ends the first book with the decision that being a vampire - and yes, being with Edward in the long run - is more important to her than doing what Edward wants her to do.)

Also, Bella may not cross the "no sex in ya books" line but it flirts with it really well, because the one thing it does have is discussion about desire and the the fact that girls want sex. (not Men, not boys, not women, but girls.) Which happens in ya books, but rarely to the degree that Twilight takes it, and almost never outside of ya lit and mags.

That the author wrote the later books to explicitly say that women need a man to be whole is bad. That girls feel like half a person because they are teens and because girls are pressured to be blah (and think of sex as something they have but that only guys want) is a fact of life. That teen girls like Twilight has more to do with the latter than agreeing with the author on the former - which is obvious by how actual teen girls and young women react to the books. That a series that makes the former argument is so popular is depressing, but more in the sense that it's sad that it's easier to address this split that teen girls feel by falling back on bad gender roles. Not so much in the "OMG impressionable teen girls are reading this!" sense.

I certainly wish they had something better to read, but I also don't find it entirely worthless. In fact, I think the first books is fairly good and intriguing. Because while Meyer's series comes to some disturbing conclusions, she captures how teen girls feel really well. Which means that despite glossing over all the bad things her solution to this problem will create in its stead, teen girls are still exploring this feeling of being half a person more than if they simply got the same bad gender roles from, like, every romantic comedy ever written. Which means they are more likely to come to a different conclusion about how to deal with it by reading Twilight than by not reading it, despite the overall message of the series itself.

It would be much better still if Twilight presented a different solution altogether and there are a lot of other things to complain about. (God forbid I should ever tell anyone to not complain about anti-feminism in media.) However, in order to create and talk up the kind of media that is better than Twilight, it really helps to understand why Twilight is so popular. What really doesn't help is talking down to teen girls and making condescending assumptions about the media they consume and why they choose it.

So, can we please lay off the OMG the vampires are sparkly and how in the world could teen girls like this stuff?

PLEASE?!?!?!? PLEASE?!?!?!? PLEASE?!?!?!?

The Bad, More Bad, The Good, and The Messy Aftermath

So, this crap annoys me. Obviously.

******

Also, regarding the idiocy found in this article (linked to in the comments of the post above) about how they just don't make kids like they used to -

Who cares if kids nowadays don't yet know what an old-fashioned trolley is. Do you think I knew what one was when I was 5? Do you want to know how I learned what one was? By going to Disneyland every year. So, really, I think Disneyland of all places might just survive having some old-fangled machine that kids don't recognize right away.

******

However....

.....this? Is just so cute its completely distracting me from all my justified annoyance.

Help! I don't know what to do or how to feel!

(and I'm a little worried that I'm a bad person for thinking it's cute. the cultural appropriation smells a bit too fishy to me to completely pass the sniff test.

but..but...but...they remind me of those key rings they sell at my local comic shop! how cool is that? plus...her ears are crab claws. OMG!!!! I think my brain just exploded from the sheer awesomeness of ears that are crab claws!!!!!!!!)

Introducing Super K!

Work? What's that?






And no, that's not me. That's my big sis.

PS Since I do actually have work to do, I won't be changing the typos anytime soon, so y'all will have to live with them for a while.

Students Back Obama and McCain

That's today's headline for my local paper, and it's completely cracking me up right now.

It's actually referring to the local results of a statewide mock primary that students at my local HS (and one of the local middle schools) participated in. Obama won the local mock Democratic nominatiion and McCain won the local mock Republican nomination.

(Now, keep in mind as you read this that I live in a rather rich, conservative, religious section of one those nice big red counties on the CA map.)

What I find really funny is that if you look at the actual numbers, you see that Clinton - despite losing by a landslide - still got more total votes than McCain did.

These are the results:

Obama 299
Clinton 132
Edwards 25

total Democratic votes: 456

MCCain 96
Romney 38
Paul 32
Huckabee 26
Giuliani 23

total Republican votes: 215

Wow. I mean, I'm used to the current under 35's -especially the under 24's - leaning towards the Democrats by a big amount. But by a supermajority a usually Republican district? Damn. That's just pathetic.

Seriously, look at that. Obama got more votes all by himself than all the Republican candidates combined. Obama, all by himself, beat the combined votes for Republicans by more than 10%.

heh.

Games Good, Books Bad?

In a recent discussion over a Feminist Gamers, the topic of controversies over books versus controversies over games came up.

(pretty much, someone said something to the effect of "books never get treated this way!" and I called bullshit.)

Might Ponygirl replied with

But I think that videogames just don’t enjoy the sort of support in their controveries that books do.

Which is true, but "books have it bad too!" really wasn't the point I was trying to make. But then I wasn't really sure what my point was at the time, and my point wasn't the topic of discussion. The good news: I figured out what I want to say, and I have my own blog to say it at.

And really, I did say it in my comment over there, I just didn't explain it very well.

[P]eople rarely see “bad” books as evidence that books are bad, even though that’s exactly what they do when it comes to TV, movies, and games.

The flipside to this - the one that people rarely see - is that this also means that you now have the issue of what qualifies as a book. Most often, the debate is phrased as whether something is "really" literature. In my line of work the question often becomes whether it's something the parent will accept as fulfilling the requirement that they "read more and goof around less." (Needless to say, graphic novels rarely count, despite their growing popularity.)

Like a lot of common misconceptions, this doesn't seem, on the face of it, like a bad thing. And it isn't always. Parents should push their kids to to challenge themselves, and I don't believe that kids get as much from reading Goosebumps as they get from reading Bridge to Terabithia.

But there's the catch, the requirement that they get something out of it. Pleasure apparently doesn't qualify as "something" in that sentence.

(And now my ADD brain is remembering a conversation I had recently with someone about how we don't get enough vacation time. Back to the topic at hand....)

Whenever I suggest a book, and the kid says yes but the parent says no, it's almost always because it's not "serious" enough. Whenever a kid asks for a book, and the parent says no, the most common reason given (aside from cost) is that it's not "what they should be reading" - as in, you should be reading something that isn't called Captain Underpants and isn't full of pictures.

Now, I'm not saying that books have it worse than games. They don't. (Recent library workshop aside) Games can only dream of qualifying as worthwhile in their own right, rather than as a way to trick kids into doing something worthwhile. Even TV, which I think is much more limited in possible educational value than video games are, is more likely to be labeled as educational than any video game. What I'm saying is that the problems that books do have overlap with the problems that games have, so displays of sibling rivalry are hardly helpful.

Lauren wrote at Feministe that

The part that’s insidious for me is labeling the [Baby Einstein] videos “educational” when “entertainment” is clearly more honest. When parents start scheduling them into the child’s day, they’re doing so in their children’s best interest, but potentially to the detriment of the child’s education. Especially when a parent who is interesting in helping to further the child’s education might have better tools available to them for a similar price.

And I have to agree. But the problem is that you aren't supposed to give anything to small children that isn't explicitly educational, so there's really no other way to market them except to say that they are good because they are educational. And the AMA's dishonesty about why such videos are bad for kids** gives the companies even more incentive to lie about their product than they would have otherwise. Disney can't make ads simply saying that they are the best entertainment videos for babies and toddlers (even though I think they are) because such things are not supposed to exist.

One thing I do disagree with Lauren about is the type of educational value the Baby Einstein's videos have. Supposedly, it's all in rote learning - people seem to think the videos act like flash cards. However, If you watch the videos it's clear that kids mostly learn from them by processing the stories, the same kind of learning that we supposedly encourage when the stories are told through other mediums. To me, this confusion implies that the value we place on storytelling depends highly on the medium through which the story is told. Which, in turn, suggests that the greatest value we place on storytelling is on it's ability to familiarize children with the "right" kinds of mediums - or facts and skills. Stories themselves have dubious value, perhaps because their intent is to entertain as well as teach. The perception seems to be that, once kids can read, unless they are clearly "reading to learn" something specific, reading is not always good for them.

****************

Books are challenged and banned for all kinds of reasons, but there is a common thread running through all the challenges to books for children*** - and no, it's not religious beliefs or sexual content. It's whether or not the book counts as "literature." Controversial topics are usually considered ok, so long as the book is clearly lecturing at them. That's why books are more likely to get support when they are challenged. Since it's the actual message itself that's being debated and not the basic content, you have an easier time finding people who agree with the message strongly enough to fight for it.

The children's novels that made it to the ALA's top ten challenged books for 2006 are the Gossip Girls series, the Alice series, The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, the Scary Stories series, Athletic Shorts, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The Chocolate War****. The adult novels are Beloved and The Bluest Eye. So, sex, obviously, is a big no-no. And anything that suggest that the white, heterosexual man is not the center of the universe.

But apparently, kids having fun isn't really a good thing either.

(In fact, I'd say this is a big part of why sex is a no-no. Sex without procreation has no value other than fun.)

While there are plenty of books that kids ask for by name because they have to read it, there are fewer that kids ask for because they want to read them. Yet, out of all seven of the kid's books on that list, there are only two books that I've never been asked for by name, by a kid, who wanted to read it for fun. I'm not going to count the hundreds of thousands of books in the store and library to do the math, but fairly certain that 70% of the books in either place don't fit into that category.

Even more than that, four of those books are ones that reluctant readers - several, in fact - have asked for by name. I don't need to do the math to be absolutely certain that the number of books in the store and library that fit into that category is much, much lower than 50+ percent.

Now, again, I'm all for parents pushing kids to challenge themselves.

Still, I find it telling that the Gossip Girls is number two on the list of most challenged books for 2006, and yet the CW started a new series based on the books this fall. (Presumably aimed at a similarly aged audience.)

The contrast between the Harry Potter movies' sucess and book challenges made more sense, because it tends to be just a select group of people who dislike Harry Potter so much that they think kids shouldn't read it. But nobody likes the Gossip Girls. Well, no adult anyway. So while I'm sure that there are lots of kids who will be told that they can't read or watch Gossip Girls, I'm sure there's also a great many whose parents and teachers and librarians try to talk them out of reading Gossip Girls but whose parents won't care about them watching Gossip Girls any more or less than any other TV show.

Now, parents don't hate these books because they are fun, they just see fun as having extremely limited value.***** There's this idea that's taken root in our collective minds that, unless something is explicitly educational or healthy, it's probably bad for kids.

Or maybe it's that, if kids are having fun, they can't possibly be learning as well. So it's one thing for them to watch Gossip Girl, it's another for them to suck all the educational value out of reading by reading trashy books.

I think it's probably both, depending on the situation.

We need to educate people on the health and educational benefits that video games have. The internet and TV too. But we need to advocate for kids' right to have fun as well. Even if for no other reason than because the idea that fun is a privilege, not a right, leads us to cut off kids access to things that are explicitly good for them. Like exercise (ie, recess) for grade schoolers, or books for reluctant readers. Even the dynamic that Lauren decries in her post is one in which parents choose to have their kids watch Baby Einstein videos rather than play in healthier ways because the supposed rote learning they get from the videos is thought of as more educational that the learning they get through play.





*That and we think kids are really stupid - Baby Einstein couldn't possibly teach through stories because babies are too young to process stories. Never mind that they do so all the time. (I let go, it falls.)

**All kinds of studies supposedly say that any time watching TV lowers vocabulary, but I've yet to see one that doesn't make some stupid decision, like not control for time spent talking to parents or lumps kids who watch TV and play with books with kids who just watch TV.

***Children's books that children are meant to read themselves, rather than books like And Tango Makes Three which is primarily meant to be read to them.

****The common perception is that The Chocolate War is literature, but it's placement on the list is a holdover from when this was not the common perception, back when it came out and, along with The Outsiders and other peers, created the YA genre.

****We also think kids are excessively stupid. Like, kids who will be able to vote in two years are completely and totally unable to distinguish fact from badly written wish-fulfillment fiction. Have I mentioned that yet?

How to Do a Cover, The Right Way - X2

The UK covers for Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series are exceptionally brilliant and creepy. The series is about a future distopia where everyone has full body plastic surgery+ at age 16. The covers communicate this idea by using naked and dismembered Barbie dolls. Whoever designed them did an amazing job. They are creepy as hell, but the use of Barbie dolls gives them the perfect balance of absurdity and horror.




This is the Brazillian cover for his novel So Yesterday, which is about a teen focus groupie, the Innovator he runs into on the street, and the mysterious appearance and disappearance of the coolest sneakers ever made. Thematically, it's about advertising, capitalism, consumerism, and identity.



The back continues the paper doll theme by including the actual paper dolls.

One thing I have to say about covers for teen books (worldwide, apparently) is that they are much more symbolic than a lot of adult or kid covers. Yeah, it's not a representative sample, but take a look at the covers for the top 25 books on Amazon. None of the other books (which, besides Harry, are all for adults) make use of visual metaphor in quite the same way the two teen books on the list do. I wonder what that means about the relative sophistication of the two groups in terms of literary and visual analysis. :)

Baby Bart? On American Idol?

Studies like this - or rather, articles like this - drive me crazy.

'Baby Einstein': a bright idea?

Infants shown such educational series end up with poorer vocabularies, study finds. Researcher says 'American Idol' is better.

By Amber Dance, Times Staff Writer
August 7, 2007

Parents hoping to raise baby Einsteins by using infant educational videos are actually creating baby Homer Simpsons, according to a new study released today.

(emphasis mine)

Studies never say shit like this, and while I realize that newspapers need to try to sell information/newspapers, they can do so while being scientifically accurate. First of all, the writer should have used "may be" rather than "are." (for reasons I'll go into in a bit) and "according to the results of a" rather than "according to a" because the way it's written now makes it sound like they are paraphrasing rather than interpreting the study. Also, the bit about American Idol needs to be crossed off. It's eye catching to be sure, but since the exact quote (found at the end of the article) is:

"I would rather babies watch 'American Idol' than these videos," Christakis said, explaining that there is at least a chance their parents would watch with them — which does have developmental benefits.

(emphasis mine)

it's misleading in the extreme. Headlines should not act like all the adorable newsboys in Newsies.

So, what does the study say? Well, the article has three whopping paragraphs about the actual study (about a third to a quarter of the total story):

For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as "Brainy Baby" or "Baby Einstein," they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found.
...

Christakis and his colleagues surveyed 1,000 parents in Washington and Minnesota and determined their babies' vocabularies using a set of 90 common baby words, including mommy, nose and choo-choo.

The researchers found that 32% of the babies were shown the videos, and 17% of those were shown them for more than an hour a day, according to the study in the Journal of Pediatrics.

....

Christakis said children whose parents read to them or told them stories had larger vocabularies.

Two things stand out.

First, that half the parents who showed their kids the videos had their kids watch them for more than an hour a day, which (I believe) goes against the instructions on the videos. It definitely goes against common sense. Considering how much time babies/toddlers spend sleeping and eating and how much time they need to spend talking to people and doing physical activity, doing anything other than these four things for more than an hour a day is generally not a good idea. It's not the positive act of watching the videos that's the problem, it's the negative act of not doing the talking and the moving around. So, as long as you make sure your baby/toddler spends a lot of time doing these things, there's really no reason to think that you are dumbing your baby down by popping in a video every once in while. And since the study didn't divide up kids who watched up to an hour and kids who watched more than an hour, it doesn't really tell us more than were already knew, or could have guessed.

Secondly, the way the last sentence is phrased suggests that there are two groups of parents, the ones who show their kids videos and the ones who talk and read to their kids. In reality, there are three, parents who show their kids videos, parents who talk and read to their kids, and parents who do both. (Well, four, there are also parents who do none of these things, but we don't need a study to tell us that this control group would have a lot of developmentally lagging children.)

This is why the "are" instead of a "may be" annoys the crap out of me. My niece and nephew have had both Baby Einstein videos and a crazy amount of books since day one. They've always been read to a lot and have only watched more than an hour of television a day on very rare occasions. I don't know if the Baby Einstein videos have helped or hurt them or neither, but they are most definitely not Homer Simpsons. And since having to sit with them while they watch videos and cartoons would have taken away one on my sister's breaks and made her more frazzled and worn out during the rest of the day, I very strongly disagree that watching American Idol or anything else with my sister would have been to anyone's benefit.

As I understand it, the Baby Einstein videos were not created to make babies smarter so much as they are meant to be media that is developmentally appropriate for babies and toddlers. In my opinion, the Baby Einstein videos are developmentally appropriate as long as you follow these three conditions:

1) no more than an hour a day (preferably less than an hour and not every day) - except on rare occasions.

2) stick to the ages recommended as much as possible (it's ok to bend the rules if your kid is above or below the curve and if your kid as become obsessed with a particular topic)

3) Repetition. Don't buy a bunch and show a new one each day, start with just one or two and show the same one for an entire week - or even month, if you are only showing them videos a couple times a week.

We've already discussed rule number 1. Rule number 2 is there because the concepts in the videos are broken down into age appropriate concepts and matched with age appropriate pacing and dialogue.

The article describes the videos as

The videos, which are designed to engage a baby's attention, hop from scene to scene with minimal dialogue and include mesmerizing images, like a lava lamp.

Which isn't really accurate. They do not "hop from scene to scene" - at least not compared to most TV/movies. They are very slow paced, with much fewer cuts per minute, and tend to include a lot of logical transitions. Seriously, minutes will go by at times without a cut*, which pretty much doesn't happen in regular TV unless you're watching a show by Joss Whedon or the like.

The minimal dialogue is good for the babies, who don't benefit from dialogue on screen the same way they benefit from the conversation around them.** The "dialogue" in the videos for babies is meant to act like a parent consistently pointing to a dog and saying "dog." They pretty much repeat a handful of vocabulary words at appropriate times. Which, no, does not work as well as having the child interact with others, but it is better than lots of dialogue on screen. The videos for older toddlers have more actual dialogue than what babies can follow on screen, and that's part of the reason why it's best to stick to the recommended ages.

Rule 3 is there to remind parents that kids need repetition in order for things to sink in. That's why the videos will repeat the same images and words over and over again. That's also why your kid will ask for the same book over and over again. One of the TV shows that has been proven to increase kid's vocabulary and thinking skills, Blue's Clues, only really does so when the repetition that the creators intended (the same show repeated throughout the week) is followed.

Videos are not a substitute for parent-child interactions or books and stories. But considering how much information adults get from media like TV, it's about time we started thinking critically about how to make our kids media saavy in ways that go beyond "advertising bad" and "TV bad." Part of that includes more nuanced studies than just "reading is better than watching movies!" Well, considering the state of the media, duh. But until we acknowledge that moving pictures can be more than just entertainment, very few of them will be anything other than entertaining.

****

*A noticeable one, anyway. Some of the videos have skits with puppets, and there will be cuts between the skits when the puppets are offstage, but you have to know what you are looking for to see them.

**A caveat: while still not as good as person to person conversation, dialogue that rhymes a lot (songs, nursery rhymes, poetry, Dr. Seuss books on tape) should work as well as the concentration on particular vocabulary words. The idea is that, because babies have a harder time following dialogue on screen, you want to focus on one thing instead of expecting them to pick it all up together. Having mostly words that rhyme allows them to focus on the sound of language, rather than the meaning of words. This is the one area I think the Baby Einstein videos are lacking in, they concentrate too much on vocabulary and not enough on the other parts of language that babies need to learn.

Yes, You Know Your School Had One Too

Me should be in bed.

But I want to steal a quote from a commenter over at Shakesville/Shakespeare's Sister because it pins down exactly why all the hand wringing over the poor boys in this case is getting on my nerves.

....Kids in school are forced to put up with all kinds of abuse, even when teachers SEE it, and hitting back can get you expelled. If the boys had touched female teachers on the bottom and breast, they would have been immediately punished for the unthinkably inappropriate behavior. "Lots of kids at school do that," is being used as an excuse because middle school girls are so powerless. People question out loud whether the boys really did anything wrong are really wondering how middle school girls got the balls to inconvenience parents, teachers, law enforcement, the courts, and boys with promising futures, by complaining when they were molested.

- greenmorgaine

(emphasis mine)

If we can expect kids to respect their teachers, we can expect kids to respect each other.

We let kids get away with a lot of shit in the under the guise of expecting them to work it out themselves. But when the larger culture excuses or condones bad behavior it is our responsibility to step in - no matter their age - and tell them it's not ok after all.

Sexual harassment is a serious issue in schools and needs to be dealt with appropriately and definitively.

If for no other reason (as if kids harassing kids wasn't reason enough) than because places where crap like this goes on - which is pretty much everywhere - are also places where the people in charge turn a blind eye to adult behavior as well. We may wring our hands over child rapists and the like constantly, that doesn't stop us from ignoring the very real harassment that adults often put children through.

I do not want to have the same commiserating talk with my niece that I had with my younger cousin - the one about the middle school teacher who puts all the pretty/big breasted girls near the front.

And until kids feel safe speaking out when they've been wronged by their peers, we won't have much success in dealing with harassment from people in positions of power.

edited to add:

Why did I make the jump from kids to adult offenders so quickly, despite my last two lines below? Because both my cousin and I were pulled out of particular subjects because of such teachers. Kathy's point about the lawyers "boys with bright futures" sound bite reminded me of that, and of how sexist that line is. No talk of how the girls lives are affected by such behavior. No talk about the jr. high school science geek who couldn't take science her ninth grade year because the teacher was a sexist pervert who was later convicted of molestation. No talk about girls that have had to make similar choices to avoid peers that the people in charge refused to deal with - and I know of quite of few such girls.

(I really, really need to smash something right now.)

end edit

PS, re the whole sex offender registry, greenmorgaine also has this to say:

I also want to point out how screwed up it is that a law supposedly intended to protect people from sex offenders is causing people to propose letting sex offenders walk away without even misdemeanor charges.

The sex offender registry needs to be fixed or scrapped. We need to stop giving kids adult punishments.

And I really think that's all that needs to be said on that subject.

Thoughts on Childhood and Othering

Feministe guest blogger Roy has a post up ranting about people who say they hate children. His very good point is that making blanket statement about children themselves is othering and discriminating.

I wasn't terribly surprised to see this argument pop up in response:

My point is that childhood is a phase, not a permanent state. You cannot identify a permanent set of children and work to change their status, because they will not remain children. Children can’t be said to be discriminated against, because they aren’t permanent members of a group. Instead, they will inevitably leave that group and join the “other side.”

Pardon me while I digress for a bit.

Sophomore year of college the trustees hired a new President specifically to make financial changes. Needless to say we were not happy about a lot of them. One particular one was protested from the moment it was suggested. Candlelight vigils were held, letters were drafted and sent, etc. We were promised that this would not, in fact be one of the cuts.

Spring break comes around, and during that week - when everyone is off campus - that exact change was announced.

It's pretty typical of colleges to do this. I saw the same thing happen again at the University of Oregon when the President went back on his word and overturned a joint decision made by him and a committee of students and faculty. And he announced it during summer break. And they can get away with it because a significant percentage of the people they are screwing over changes about every four years.

Childhood, like being a college student, is a temporary stage, but the fact that children will one day be less powerless does not mean that they are not constantly screwed over the way college students are by their administrators. The temporariness of childhood is part of what makes abuse - both large and small - so heart-breakingly constant. It's certainly not a reason to fail to see a pattern in the abuse.

And the way our culture often treats children - especially once they've grown past the cute stage - is very much abuse.

My supervisor asked me just the other day if (in the near future when we have money for another person) I would consider dropping the children part of Youth specialist and concentrate just on teens.

I have to admit I was a little floored. I tend to feel like I'm drowning when I deal with the teens. I never liked being one, I never liked my peers when I was one, and I rarely feel like I understand them the way that I understand the younger children. And quite frankly the teens that come into the library drive me batshit insane on a regular basis.

But I've also noticed that most adults tend to treat teenagers as either oversized children or defective adults. Despite having been a teen at some point, there's often no respect or understanding for what they are going through, much praise less for their skills or compassion for their developmental limitations. We scorn teens for not yet being adults in a way that we rarely do with younger children.

The fact that todays teens will not be teens forever does not mean that teenagers are not among one of the most derided groups of people in modern society. Neither does it mean that their lack of power is not often used to abuse and neglect them.

It scares me and makes me very sad that I can considered to be a really good YA librarian just because I try to treat teens as people - and not defective adults or monstrous children.

Drive-by Parenting - Special Bookstore Edition!

Now normally, I despise drive-by parenting. However, being no less of a hypocrite than everyone else, I am always ecstatic when I have an opportunity to engage in it and get away with it. (Except for the whole "kids being in danger" part that usually prompts it.)

I was meandering around in the bookstore the other night picking up massively huge piles of books that kids had left on the floor, on chairs, on the completely wrong display, in the so very obviously wrong section and from pretty much everywhere except a place where people would not accidentally step on it, when I heard some kid yelling something.

Now, kids yell all the time, so I automatically tuned it out. Until I realized that he was calling for someone. Since the kid looked to be about four and he'd been yelling for a good while already, this wasn't a good thing. So I stopped him and asked him if he was lost, was he looking for someone, was he with his parents....

Cute Kid: "Yeth. I'm looking for my thithter."

Me: (not his parents?) Your sister? What does she look like?

CK: (silence)

Me: How old is she?

CK: Six.

Me (SIX!!!!!! Fantastic, now I have missing parents and a missing kid and I can't do a Code Adam on the six-year old bc there is no way this kid is going to be able to give me a description. Shit.) How old are you?

CK: Five. I need my thithter.

Me: Well, why don't we go look for her ok? Let's look around the kid's section first , maybe you just missed her.

CK: (takes my hand) I already looked.

Me: Well, why don't we just look again. If we don't find her in here, we'll look around the rest of the store.

We found her just as we were about to leave the kid's section - she came walking back from having gone to the bathroom. On the other side of the store. Apparently alone.

Me: How old are you?

CK's Sister: Six.

CK: I told you that!

Me: Do you know where your parents are?

CKS: In here.

Me: Well, why don't we go find them.

So, I start walking around the store, a kid in each hand. We get about 15 feet from the kid's section when the kids turn around and I see this guy walking up all upset and confused. He tells me they're his kids. (Thankfully, it's usually really easy to tell if the people who say they are the parents are the parents bc of the way the kids act.)

I start to tell him that his kids were alone in the kid's section and that he needs to stay close to them and he cuts me off and says he was nearby.

I tell him that his son was yelling for his older sister for quite a while and he explains that he's partly deaf in one ear.

Me: All the more reason to keep them close to you.

I barely manage to not add "jackass" - partly cuz he looked so confused.

On that note, a few rules for parents, since with summer approaching, I predict that reminders will become necessary more frequently:

1) We are not a baby-sitting service.

2) If your kids do not behave, I will tell them to do so.

3) How nicely I ask them to do so will depend on their age. I will use my substitute voice on 12 year-olds that are doing things that preschoolers know are wrong.

4) I won't care that you are sitting right there.

5) Unless your kid is old enough to stay home alone, you had damn well better be sitting right there. And too distracted by your other children to have had a chance to tell the kid stepping on the books to stop doing so.

6) If you are not sitting right there, I will find you and tell you that your child needs watching. Even if they are fourteen. And do not argue with me about this one. My bosses will not fire me for making sure that your children are not destroying the store and/or are not kidnapped. They probably won't even care if I'm snippy with you when I tell you to do your damn job.

7) The children's section is not a playground. Do not let your children play tag or use the very unstable benches as launching pads. (Dancing on the stage, is however, permitted. Even if it's cuteness is directly disproportional to how aggravating everyone else has been that day.)

8) If you disobey these rules - even after I've explained them to you - I will kick you and your children out. The $3.99 you were going to spend on a Spider-Man 3 or Disney Princess paperback is worth losing if it means the company avoids a lawsuit from your kid cracking his or her head open.

Special note:

Your twelve year old is not in really in any danger of being carried off, so stop hovering. Older kids tend to kick up a fuss if people they don't know try to make them do stuff. So (except for semi-private places like the restrooms) your kid is just fine as long as you and he/she stay within earshot or within agreed upon areas.

Extra special note:

Your five -year old is in danger of being carried off, so keep him or her within your sight, not just within earshot. It's not statistically likely, but bad people who want to hurt kids know where to find kids - and our store is one of them. And until they are around seven or so, most (non-shy) kids will go along with any adult who seems friendly. Especially in public places with lots of strangers.

County Removes Graphic Novel With Hamster Sex From it's Shelves

First, Some Background

This is going to be hard to explain without naming names, but I'm going to try.

I live in [Blank] County, CA. It is one of the largest counties in the United States. A big bunch of that is desert, national forest, designated wilderness, etc. There are huge swathes of land - some of it with people living on it - that are not incorporated into any city. It is the county's job to provide to these areas the kind of services that cities provide. Thus, we have a countywide library system with branches anywhere from 10 minutes to over an hour apart. Please understand, though, that [Blank] County also has a lot of people. Some branches are very tiny and serve small communities (like mine). Others are big and serve areas as heavily populated as any decent sized city.

[Blank] County, like a lot of local governments, has had some issues with corruption recently. That means they have an image problem at the moment. [Blank] County is also one of those reddish-purple spots on those voting maps that everyone likes to post. The reps we send to the state and national level tend to lean right, several of the homes near my branch up in the mountains are strictly vacation homes, and we have one of the largest Mormon populations outside of Utah. Needless to say, we also have a very diverse population, including a a very large working class and poor population and a significant number of Spanish speakers. [Blank] County is still very much California, but it's slightly poorer and much more conservative than most people imagine California to be.

I mention all this only because it turns out that there was a reason why Tokyopop was invited to speak at my library's countywide meeting for YA/Childrens' librarians.

[Blank] County Removes Graphic Novel With Hamster Sex From it's Shelves

Last spring, a kid from [Middle of Nowhere], CA, checked out Paul Gravett’s Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics from his local [Blank] County Library Branch. When he showed his parent the one page that showed Hamster Sex! (why? what self-respecting teen does that?), the parent brought this fact to the Library's attention.

The book ended up getting pulled completely from the shelves of every branch in the county that owned a copy, rather than simply moved to the appropriate location in each branch. Yes, someone had decided that since it was full of "cartoons" that it belonged in the Juvenile section. Publicly, the Library Director says that it was a joint decision with the County Board of Supervisors. The rumblings I heard today suggest that that the decision was made against the library's wishes. I don't know which story is correct.

I do know, however, that we can request this title from a nearby county through the same system that we use to request books from other branches in our own library. No, I do not mean interlibrary loan, I mean that all a patron has to do is walk in and ask us to request the book from the system and it will arrive a few days later, free of charge. This isn't something special for this book, it's just a deal we have. I thought I'd mention it because it highlights so well, IMHO, just how ridiculous this stuff can get to be.

But Shouldn't Children Be Saved From Graphic Hamster Sex?

I was in grade school when The Simpson's came out and were a Big Thing. Kids used to wear Bart Simpson T-shirts to school all the time. My parents never let my brother or I watch it.

I'm still not sure if this was a good decision or a bad one. The Simpson's is not a children's show and children really shouldn't be watching it. However, since it's not a show made for kids, I really don't think we would have liked it, and I wonder if not letting us do so simply made it forbidden fruit.

I'm not against directing children's media choices. I think that's our job as adults. But I also know that I read a lot of stuff as a kid that would have shocked my parents, and I really think I benefitted from it in the end (here is where I would link to my as yet to be written posts on scifi/fantasy and romance novels). Generally, I'm mostly for directing children's choices, and mostly against dictating children's choices. When it comes to stuff that isn't schoolwork or chores, I think it's better for kids if they have a certain amount of freedom. I also think weeding out the really bad stuff is easier if you keep the dictating to a minimum and stick to more creative ways of directing their choices. Even as a teenager, I knew that it would be easier to get my then preschool cousin away from Ren and Stimpy and Rocky and Bulllwinkle (neither of which seemed appropriate to me for a four-year old) if I said that it was time to play outside instead of making a big deal about either of the shows. I understand that sometimes you just need to say "no" in clear and plain language - I just don't see that the library had gotten to that point. I think people were mostly just freaked out by something odd and no one wanted to be seen as defending Hamster Sex! - for kids!

Most of all though, I'm really against other adults telling me what I can read. I happen to like a lot of stuff that I don't think kids should read and a lot of stuff their parents wouldn't read themselves. But my tax dollars go to pay for library books as well. It's one thing to argue that the money should go to pleasing an audience consisting of more people than just me, it's quite another to get rid of books already bought just because kids (possibly) shouldn't be reading it.

I'm also beyond fed up with the idea that if it's cartoons, it must be for kids. Thankfully, that's slowly changing - it just needs to change faster, then we won't have as many problems with stupid stuff like this.

After all, Laurell K. Hamilton's books and Gregory Maguire's Wicked include a lot of weird sex (the former probably more explicit than the Hamster Sex!) and they're still on our shelves.