The Best Parental Response To Learning You Child Wants To Read Twilight

 

I am friends with some amazing parents.

I personally am not a parent and I’m never going to be but I have seen some remarkable parenting among my peers. Seriously, I managed to befriend a really great crop of tall humans who are raising smaller humans.

Many of those smaller humans are female and their parents share several concerns. Among these concerns? The Twilight Series.

These books are objectively awful. I don’t just mean that they’re badly written, which they are, I mean that they offer a text book example of an abusive relationship.

According to one of the most insightful and screamingly funny analyses of the series that I’ve ever read, a great deal of the problem is the strong LDS influence. I can’t speak to that, not having any real experience of the religion.

Here’s what I can speak to; I’ve been abused. This book, assuming that its plot resembles the movie, is pretty much a text book example of the genesis and continence of an abusive relationship.

There are other bloggers who have gone over the specific whys and hows of the abusive situations exemplified in the series.

This is not a post about the specific problems of the Twilight series. This is a post about what parents can do to address those problems when their children come to them wanting to read the story of abuse and violence wherein the entire point is to keep the abuser and his victim together.

Here is the answer the parents of LSG have come up with.

“Yes child, you can, as long as you take this as well.” There have been a lot of Domestic Violence BINGO ideas but this one came with a side of brilliant parenting. Why? Because they added the age old and effective parental tool of bribery. They added prizes. Every time their kid gets BINGO the kid gets a suitably motivational reward of some kind as long as they can provide examples.

This? It’s pure parenting win!

It’s an actual solution as opposed to the whole attempting to keep the kids from reading the book, thing. In case any parent was unaware, that never, ever works. Promise.

This not only allows the parent to monitor what their kid is reading, it forces the kid into a situation wherein they are talking to the parents about what they are reading and it draws attention to the huge problems within the text.

There is no bad here. everyone who is a parent or knows a parent or any teens or pretty much anyone at all, should tell people about this idea.