Re-appropriating “age appropriate”

On literary feasts and content feeds

When our oldest turned three, he asked to watch PJ Masks, a superhero show targeting preschoolers. It’s not awful, as far as these things go, but my wife and I disliked the crude humor and name-calling. What if our Perfect Boy called another kid “PJ Dork” on the playground?

“It’s inappropriate,” we told him as we turned on Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood again. It was our first instantiation of the principle but not our last.

So when it came time to select literature for our oldest this year, we naturally gravitated towards The Iliad, that unassuming tale in which nothing untoward ever happens. Except for adultery, war, looting, pillaging, greed, envy, savagery, boasting, rage, and death. Lots of death. Half the main characters die: beheaded, impaled, hacked, burnt.

Even in the modern retelling we read, The Iliad is not gentle:

But before Hector could strike with his sword, Achilles drove the remaining spear straight through his neck, bringing him stumbling and choking to the ground. “Dogs and ravens shall tear your flesh unburied,” Achilles said, looking down at him in the dust.

…Then Achilles did a hideous thing. He cut through Hector’s ankles behind the tendons that run from heel to calf, threaded broad thongs of oxhide through them, and fastened them to the framework of his chariot. … As [Achilles rode away], Hector’s body was dragged behind, twisting and lurching over the rough ground, his dark hair flying and falling into the dust and filth of the battlefield.

And then Achilles yelled, “How do you like that, PJ DORK?”

The Iliad is utterly inappropriate for an eight-year-old in 2024. While books don’t induce the same nightmares as video, 140 pages of back-and-forth murder will stick with a kid. As a story, it can be hard to follow and frustratingly fickle. The gods flit in and out on a whim; the characters have no interiority. There’s no simple moral to leave with at the end, except maybe: be glad you don’t live back then.

Appropriate, though, does not just mean “fit for consumption”. Its Latin roots are ad and proprius — to make something one’s own. It’s an active declaration that this thing is for us.

Charlotte Mason compared curriculum selection to spreading a feast before the child. The student may not prefer this item or that, but if there’s a rich and varied spread, the student will find something that delights and fills them. They may not prefer broccoli on the first bite, but that’s no reason to exclude it or to serve only desserts.

Modern appetites are shaped much more by algorithmic feeds than literary feasts. Feeds exploit human behavior to serve recent and engaging content to their users. They compress content into smaller and smaller chunks to maximize throughput—from books to long-form, to blog posts, to short posts, to tweets. There’s no sense of place, time, or volume in the Feed. It’s just an infinite stream of consumption.

For a few years, parents have this power to deliver content, too. But what algorithms lack, parents have. Parents control the atmosphere, the childhood milieu. A parent (or educator) can turn a four-line poem into a daily ritual or a book into a memory. When a parent appropriates content and endorses it as worthwhile, they aren’t a regulator or an engine. They’re a companion.

The challenge of deciding what’s appropriate, like so much of parenting, runs deep. It pushes you to ask, for your family, what is good? For us, the task is not to find content fit to engage an age but to find content fit to engage at any age.

The Iliad is vital in a way other stories are not. It’s jarring, direct, honest. What happens when Troy loses? All the men are killed, and everyone else is enslaved. Endorse it or not, The Iliad makes a statement about human nature that’s been deemed worth passing down for two centuries. That in itself makes it appropriate, even for a second grader.

Nor does it have to be sober or classic. Appropriate content can be joyful or raucous. Great authors, like Roald Dahl, tell stories that electrify, even if they sometimes break loose. (Looking at you, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.) Vibrant human energy thrums through them. Whether the story will last for the next two thousand years doesn’t matter. If it gets the student and teacher closer to the type of people they want to be, it’s healthy.

There’s no reason to restrict the feast: art, books, shows, games, music. The Lindy Rule helps here, but it’s not a set of handcuffs. But there is only so much time, and AI-generated slop and attention-fracking apps sit on every counter.

I’m not afraid to tell my kids, “This is worthy of your attention,” or “This is trash.” They don’t have to settle for PJ Masks or wait ten years to get to Real Books. It might not be easy. They may have to scrabble through dense text, unspeakable names, or uncomfortable realities: slavery, cruelty, anger, racism, or murder. But we’re all at the table together, and no one will walk away hungry.