Is your child ‘shelf-aware’? Experts dissect why we shouldn't decide what the younger generation reads

Reading together can give children the confidence to ask questions they might otherwise keep to themselves. Pic/iStock

Can a child read about a girl standing up to the Taliban? Or a teenager hiding from Nazis? Or about a family dealing with violence, or a character wrestling with grief?

If one goes by how kids respond, they will comfortably turn the page. Adults, however, tend to stop at the page. Or abandon the book altogether.

Last month, a reading list at Anand Niketan School's Shilaj campus in Ahmedabad became the centre of controversy. Two books - Malala Yousafzai's I Am Malala and Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl - were included in the Class 5 Book Club reading list. Parents objected, citing Malala's Pakistani identity and her views on Kashmir, while Anne Frank's identity as a Jewish victim of the Holocaust also became part of the objections. Following the controversy, the school made the books optional and ended its association with the consultant who had helped design the reading programme.

Arushi, Rishabh Shah and Niyati Joshi

The episode raises a question much bigger than two books:

Who gets to decide what a child is ready to read?

For publisher Niyati Joshi, founder of children's publishing house Lettori Press, adults can sometimes underestimate what children actually do with difficult ideas.

"As a child, I was never policed about what I read," she says. "If there was something I didn't understand, I would move on. At every stage in life, you learn more nuance about a particular subject."

That, she believes, is precisely what reading allows: room for nuance to arrive later.

"Children can become curious because we police too hard," she says. "And sometimes, banning something has the opposite effect."

The problem with constantly removing uncomfortable books, Joshi argues, is not merely that children lose a story. They lose the opportunity to practise encountering something unfamiliar.

"You lose the ability to sit with uncomfortable thoughts and ideas," she says.

And that matters because reading is, in many ways, an exercise in perspective. A child can spend 200 pages inside the mind of someone whose life looks nothing like theirs. They can understand why a character behaved a certain way, forgive them, question them or simply sit with a circumstance they have never experienced themselves.

"What we are missing out on is building empathy in children when we don't let them read diversely," Joshi says.

But what happens when the subject is explicitly political or socially complex? "There is often a misconception that young people cannot fully comprehend complex issues," says Rishabh Shah, founder of IIMUN, who works closely with young people between 11 and 19. "But I have seen them develop solutions to global, national, and local challenges - whether political, social, economic, or cultural - and sometimes those solutions are far better than what adults come up with."

For Shah, the answer isn't to shield young people from complexity, but to give them the opportunity to encounter it without immediately telling them what conclusion to draw.

Psychotherapist Arushi, co-founder of Children's Books for All, sees children's literature playing a particularly useful role.

"Books are more digestible," she says, explaining why she uses children's books with both kids and adults to help them talk about uncomfortable subjects.

A difficult conversation can feel intimidating when posed directly to a child. But a story creates distance. A sad donkey in a picture book, for instance, can become a way of asking: Why is the donkey sad? What makes you sad? What do you do when you're sad?

"It becomes an anchor, a medium, for difficult conversations," Arushi says. "We were once discussing a book where the character loses her smile and is looking for it. I asked the kids, ‘When do you lose your smile?' Someone said when their mom beats them, or when their father hits their mother after coming home drunk. It essentially gave them an outlet to talk."

Her organisation uses books with children across different settings, including government schools. She believes reading should not only mirror a child's immediate life but also expand it.

"We need to relate and connect to another person and know that we are not alone," she says. Shah, too, believes that shielding young people from opposing perspectives can leave them less prepared to think independently.

"Parents too often shield children from contrary positions and opposing thoughts because they want to keep them in a comfortable space," he says. "I don't necessarily blame them for that.

But if we want children to develop critical thinking and first-principles thinking from an early age, it is essential that they are exposed to perspectives that are different from their own."

Encountering another argument, he says, does not necessarily weaken a child's worldview. It can strengthen their ability to examine it. "They develop stronger cognitive abilities and begin to understand that life does not have to be a zero-sum game," he adds.

He points to the Indian intellectual tradition of Purvapaksh: the practice of understanding an opposing argument before presenting one's own. "That is something we need to enable in young people as early as possible," he says.

Sometimes, the book isn't introducing a child to a difficult subject. It is giving a child language for something they already know.

"I think it's the adults who don't want to, or know how to, deal with uncomfortable questions their kid might ask," Arushi says. The result, she argues, can be a bigger loss for the child.

Which brings us back to the question of who should decide.

"Why can't it be collaborative?" Arushi asks. She is wary of turning "age-appropriate" into a simplistic filter. Her approach is to look at what is actually happening in a classroom or community.

If children are dealing with bullying, loneliness, grief or another difficult experience, parents, teachers and librarians can look for books around those realities. Psychologists and educators can advise where a subject might need additional context. And children, importantly, can have a voice.

Difficult books need not always be read in isolation. Reading together can give children the confidence to ask questions they might otherwise keep to themselves.

That idea isn't entirely outside India's own educational framework. The Ministry of Education's Guidelines for Library Grant and Promoting Reading in Schools under Samagra Shiksha emphasise access to reading material and encourage independent reading, while also involving teachers, students and other stakeholders in building a culture of reading. It is an interesting counterpoint to the idea of the child as a passive recipient of an adult-approved bookshelf.

Of course, not every book belongs in every classroom at every age. But there is a difference between a book being difficult and a book being harmful.

Joshi believes parents should not assume that a book will automatically corrupt a child's mind. "Once children develop a genuine reading habit," she says, "they become surprisingly good at deciding what works for them. They learn that they don't have to finish every book."