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[quote=Anonymous]I’m a school librarian in a blue part of NoVA and I’ve had parents email with complaints about books with transgender characters a couple of years ago, when Moms for Liberty first started making a fuss a couple of years ago.  I was able to de-escalate those situations so they didn’t turn into formal challenges.  I also had the parent of a male fifth grader complain about Fighting Words by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, a Newbery honor title, because it depicted a girl in foster care who got a tattoo in 4th grade and whose mother went to jail for blowing up a hotel room where she was cooking meth.  She had her son stop reading after the 2nd chapter.  (Mind you, this is just the circumstance the character finds herself in; it’s not part of the plot.)  The title actually tackles much more serious topics than that, most notably CSA (addressed in an age appropriate manner, not graphically) but he didn’t read that far.  I praised her for having open communication with her son and for him knowing himself well enough to know he wasn’t comfortable reading further.  She was concerned that the title shouldn’t be in an elementary library at all but I encouraged her to read the whole book before coming to that conclusion.  Her main gripe was that those circumstances (CSA, foster care, parental substance use) was too “fringe” for kids at our school, and I disabused her of that assumption.  With 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys experiencing CSA, that book can be a lifeline for kids to know that they are not alone, that it is not their fault, and that there are adults who can help.  Statistically speaking, there are also kids in every class who have parents with substance use disorders, parents who are incarcerated, and classmates in foster care.  So the book was not for HER kid, but it might be (and is) for many other kids at our school…to understand, to develop empathy, and/or to see mirror for an aspect of their own experiences.  The mom didn’t take it further.

I am always pleased that parents are noticing what their kids are reading and fully support any parent who thinks that content may not be right for their own child (especially when they have such a good relationship that the child talks about it with the parent…thats awesome.) I find it really troubling when some parents want to control all books in a library collection because they don’t like them personally, though.  (With the exception of flagging books that may be obsolete, inaccurate, or contain racist, sexist, or otherwise abusive language.) And I’m grateful that, thus far, I have not had parents go further than their own appropriate role of guiding their own child’s reading selections and sharing concerns about the suitability of content.[/quote]

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