The most ridiculous things about banning books in school based on “development appropriateness”:
- There is no universal “development appropriateness”.
- When kids find and are interested in something, it is almost definitionally “developmentally appropriate”.
“Developmentally inappropriate” is largely a term used to mean, “A topic that a child brings to an adult that they feel uncomfortable talking about with a child of that age.”
Most exposures to content that somehow becomes traumatic is only much more so when the world signals to a child that they should never talk to an adult about what they saw and how it made them feel because they were wrong to have come across it in the first place.
I was “exposed” to so many ideas my parents probably didn’t want me to talk about as a voracious young reader. It was fine– largely because I only was “exposed” because I was ready. The ability to read complex books, and interest in them, coincides with the ability to handle complex ideas. If I wasn’t mentally or emotionally prepared to take on those ideas, I would never have been able to or desire reading those books. And my “exposure” path to new books was through every channel you’d expect– what other people who liked books I had already read recommended. I was following well-trodden paths through recommendations that make sense for people like me. My age was immaterial– I was moving through a standard progression, just younger than many other people.
Books aren’t banned because of any (unproven) negative impact they’ve ever had on children. Books are banned because of scared adults.