When I was in the third grade, my mother checked out a book about puberty and sex from the school library. I don’t remember the title, but I do remember how interested I was to see the names of all the other parents who had borrowed the same book. I was curious to know which of my classmates had had “the talk.” I felt like we’d all been initiated into some clandestine group, not that we would ever acknowledge it. The first rule about the birds and the bees is that no one talks about the birds and the bees. At least not in the third grade.
Fast forward a couple of years and things changed. The fifth grade girls at Easterly Parkway Elementary were giggling over Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, alternately embarrassed and fascinated. The following year, the sixth grade was enthralled with Judy Blume’s Forever. The controversial Forever was not available in the school library, so we shared a single battered copy, reading surreptitiously under our desks and waiting for our turn to take it home, where we hid the book under our mattresses until our parents were asleep. (The name Ralph will never be the same.)
I read those books around the time I was trying to figure out puberty and romantic relationships and sex and I’m grateful to Judy Blume and authors like her for writing honestly about topics that were too embarrassing or intimate to discuss with my parents. Those books educated me, but they did more than that. They bonded my generation and gave us a shared experience that transcended the blacktop or the classroom. Friends and I still reminisce about those stories and laugh at our adolescent innocence. In a world where Fifty Shades of Grey is a bestseller, Forever seems quaint.
I don’t know what this generation’s “secret” books are – I think that’s the point. Parents aren’t supposed to know. Maybe kids today are huddled around The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Crank, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, or Speak, but the books that teens are really talking about are probably not on my radar.
Whatever the titles, I know those stories will push boundaries and tackle topics that my boys don’t want to talk to me about. Although I have a parent’s concerns about exposing my kids to controversial or sexual topics, I’m grateful for books that don’t shy away from them. I’m glad there are authors writing about gay relationships and STDs and teen suicide and death and cyber-bullying because those things are real and we can’t pretend they don’t exist.
I hope my kids find books that speak to them and then pass them around (or share them electronically) and mark the “important” passages and talk about the troubling chapters. Whether we like it or not, our kids will start exploring the world without us and when they do, I want the stories they read to be as thoughtful and timely as the ones I grew up with.