the dirty laundry show

“AGAIN?!” Uh oh. I’d been spotted. For the second time this week (and what felt like the hundredth time this year), my son discovered me rifling through his latest library book. Am I a closeted fan of Japanese manga graphic novels? No — I was looking for one thing and one thing only: smut.

Honestly, this is a newer role for me. A bit of a gear switch. From the moment my boy learned how to read, my husband and I have done nothing but encourage him to lose himself inside as many books as humanly possible. Reading is good! It’s fun! Like a movie in your head! Who needs screens when you have all these words to look at?

We reveled in smug self-approval as he devoured every Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Dog Man tome he could get his hands on. He loved comic books, and that totally counted as a parent win. But then, the day came when he graduated from the juvenile shelves to the dreaded YA (young adult).

I mean, every book is a good book, as long as he’s reading… right?

Still, some troubling questions began to surface.

Is my homeschooled ten year-old really ready to take on subjects like trans romance, peeping toms, sexual favors, resource wars, and ritual murder (to name JUST A FEW?) He is rather mature for his age, but this sure seems like a quantum leap from Goosebumps and Choose Your Own Adventure.

As with so very many situations in this pre-pubescent life season, we grappled with the difficult line where “guardianship” and “guidance” become “sheltering” and “overprotecting.” Do I let him read whatever he’s interested in, no matter the subject? Do I read it with him and encourage discussion about the difficult stuff? Do I ban it altogether?

I erred on the side of censorship, and I had become something of a pariah to my kids as a result. I was the smut police, constantly poring through their video game, book, and movie materials, removing any offenders or, in one case, painstakingly taping sticky notes over suggestive manga illustrations.

“But the story is SO good!”

“I don’t HAVE any other books to read!”

“MOM! This isn’t THAT big of a deal!”

My kids pinned down all my emotional pressure points, hard. I wanted to cave. I tried to be cool at first, I truly did. Let them police themselves, bring up anything troubling when necessary. They’re going to encounter this stuff sooner or later, I thought. Maybe it’s better if they absorb it in small drips now rather than get firehosed by it later in life?

It felt like logical reasoning — let them get acclimated to our over-sexed, porn-obsessed culture little by little as a sort of inoculation to it all. If they get used to it, they won’t be drawn to it.

Otherwise, they may encounter it at 20, forget entirely how to function or feed themselves, and never leave their apartment (or our basement, depending on the economy). Or they may end up the real-world forty-year-old virgins! Imagine the shame and ridicule! They’ll be total weirdos!

When I sought God about it, I got nothing.

Nothing, except for an icky, unsettled feeling in my gut. Is an icky, unsettled feeling the same as the Holy Spirit? Hmm. I’ll need a judge’s ruling on this. Cracking open the most tried and true Book in the world, I encountered verse after verse exhorting us to AVOID any HINT of sexual immorality, warning us against living in flow with the culture, encouraging us to guard our hearts.

All at once, it hit me: am I inoculating them to a culture or training them to feel at home in it? If they get acclimated to small bits of smut here and there, that isn’t exactly an inoculation — it’s a near-guarantee they’ll just grow comfortable with harder and harder stuff. It’s like giving my kids small tastes of heroin so they’ll never touch the stuff. It makes zero sense in light of God’s logic.

God’s logic says to live counter to the world. If you speak it’s language enough to feel comfortable in it, you’re actually in quite a bit of trouble, spiritually-speaking.

It is the exact opposite of my job to train my kids in the world’s view of morality and sex. Even just a little bit. They should be total weirdos. “Innocent as doves.” That means I’m doing it right.

But we’re also called to be “wise as serpents,” and that means at some point, I do need to address concepts like those found in many YA novels. It’s my job, flanked by the Holy Spirit, to discern the right time for those conversations.

And that day is not today.

Today, this house is under the jurisdiction of the smut police.

Get used to it.