Training | 2009.08.10
I'm a parent, not a censor | Morven Crumlish
Bigotry, dildos, the Daily Telegraph – I\'ve explained them all to my 10-year-old. Honesty is the best policy
My daughter is an inappropriate reader. She leaps on my weekly Grazia, even when I try to hide it under cushions and fruit bowls, or disguise it as the business section. She steals all the good bits of the Saturday paper, and makes them sticky with fingerprints, spilling cereal and cola on them – so that by the time I get round to sitting down in the evening the paper looks like it\'s already lined the cat tray, and my daughter has another new word to add to her vocabulary.
"What\'s a dildo?"
"It\'s a fake penis." We both blush, and want to pretend the conversation has never happened, but I persist. "Where did you hear that word?"
"Doesn\'t matter."
Well, I beg to differ. I think that if my 10-year-old is reading about dildos, then I should really know how comprehensive the reference is. There are days when my commitment to open and honest parenting seems nothing more than a one-way ticket to my own humiliation. Nope, don\'t want to discuss my menstrual flow in Tesco either, thanks. I think how much easier it would be if I could have a Betty Draper moment, and stifle her natural inquisitiveness in favour of a neat, quiet household and a stiff drink. Repression and censorship are certainly tidier.
I don\'t think that newspapers should be child-friendly, and I don\'t want to shield her from the news. I think that plenty of children don\'t have a choice about knowing about war, poverty, malnutrition, Aids – so why should my daughter? Global problems with political roots are fair game in our house; I make her watch the sad bits during Comic Relief until she cries; it must be like living with Kilroy.
Recently, though, she has taken to reading "found" media. In the doctor\'s surgery she finds the most distasteful issue of whatever Wordsearch and Incest Weekly is stinking up the magazine racks, and pores over stories of rape, abuse and wife-swapping, all illustrated with photos of chubby children on swingsets, and scowling victims. I try discouragement, and distraction, though I fear that a downright ban will lead her to save up her pocket money for a subscription; and in the end I watch her read, as glumly distressed as if she was finishing up the dregs from the can of Special Brew in the gutter, but without the science of hygiene on my side to put a stop to it.
She has read the Sun on the train, opposite the mortified 20-year-old boy whose paper it was – if anything\'s going to put him off Page 3 it\'s having the pair of us reading it in front of him; and she has been infuriated by the Daily Telegraph, whose condemnation of single mothers incensed her.
I have always tried to give honest answers, and full explanations. I don\'t lie to my daughter, however uncomfortable the truth makes me. But sometimes I just don\'t have an answer. My daughter is clever, informed, kind-hearted, and has Asperger\'s syndrome. She wants answers, and logical explanations, and if I don\'t give them to her, then her own inferences can end up dangerously wide of the mark; at least the mark that is acceptable to me. How can I explain the logic of racism, when the racist mindset has built its own, warped and circuitous logic? I believe this, therefore it is true, and so I believe it.
And when children use the word "gay" as an insult , how is my daughter meant to unravel my rhetoric of tolerance from the reality of being picked on in the playground?
I don\'t think she believes me when I tell her that there is just so much in the world that doesn\'t make sense, or that, sometimes, her way of thinking is right, and good, and the majority view is the one that is wrong.
I have come to the conclusion that I can\'t keep trying to censor the world. Just as she will have to learn about war and poverty, so my daughter will have to come to terms with pettiness, ignorance and bigotry. These things exist, and I can only hope that being exposed to them in small doses, and in the right conditions, will increase her immunity to them.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]rents-children-media-aspergers
