I Am Malalia for rising 6th graders

[Anonymous]

I know it's not a novel. I realize it's autobiographical. I know she has grit and determination. I know she won the nobel prize.

My point is that a child reading about a child being shot in the face and left to die is disturbing. I don't think an 11 year old, who is learning about the world, should think about something like that. They have plenty to learn, and plenty of time to learn it.

When I was a kid, we didn't know about things like that at 11. We also didn't have suicide and depression rampant in high school. Protecting your children's emotional and psychological well being is part of being a good parent.

I was born in 1981. When I was 11, we absolutely knew about "things like that." We knew about all kinds of suffering in the world and were taught, in my not-even-very-good-public school system, that we were empowered to speak out about issues that we felt strongly about. There was a famine in Somalia - we raised money. The Rodney King beating had just happened - we talked about it in social studies. We read a lot of children's literature about the Holocaust, because it was the most accessible at that time. Using literature to explore difficult topics is a way to make those topics accessible to children. It gives them examples and language to describe them without making them imagine worst case scenarios for themselves and their friends.

We also had a lot of depression in high school, and for whatever reason, that never got talked about in an upfront manner by the school. I think it would have been really helpful to have our guidance counselors do more than advise when to take the PSAT and talk about college applications, but that didn't happen. I guess mental illness had more of a stigma than genocide.

Either way, the way that you protect your children's psychological health is to help them process material that is presented to them in a developmentally appropriate way. Talk to your child about this book, the acts described, the culture that it is rooted in. Listen to their responses. Do not shut down conversations about difficult things. It is a tough world out there and teaching your children how to communicate about that is a lot more healthy for them than trying to block it from their view.