"Think of the Children" Has Never Once Included the Children

The school board meeting has a script. A parent stands up and reads a paragraph aloud. The paragraph is chosen for shock. The parent says they're thinking of the children. The board votes.

Count the people in that room who are under 18. Then count the ones who get a vote.

PEN America counted 6,870 book bans in the 2024–25 school year alone, across 23 states and 87 public school districts. Across the last five school years, it has documented nearly 23,000. Every one of them came with the same stated reason. Not one of them came with a ballot for a fifteen-year-old. penpen

A ban is one household's rule with a bigger audience

PEN America counts a book as banned when a parent or community challenge, an administrative decision, or pressure from officials gets it removed or restricted. Read that as a mechanism. One family decides a book isn't right for their kid. That is a normal parenting decision. Then it becomes district policy, and it's no longer a decision about one kid. It's a decision about everyone else's. wamc

Who the books are about

The books being pulled skew toward race and racism, authors of color, and LGBTQ+ characters and themes. These aren't hypotheticals. The kid in the book is a kid who exists. The kid reading it sometimes is that kid. Removing the book doesn't remove the child it describes. It removes the one place that child got to see themselves described without a lecture. pen

The pedagogical problem

Tell a fourteen-year-old a book is too dangerous to read and you've taught one lesson: some ideas are so powerful nobody will explain why. You've also handed them a reading list.

Age-appropriateness is a real question. It has a real answer, and the answer is a parent, a kid, and a book on the same couch. A ban skips that conversation and calls the skipping "protection."

Nobody is protecting children from the book. They're protecting themselves from the child who finishes it.