They’re so confident about the imaginary content-restricting version of libraries that exist in their heads.
When I was eleven, I checked out weird ass fantasy romance erotica on my library card.
I went to the library. I asked the librarian where the books were. They led me to the section. I picked out the fantasy romance of my choice. They asked if I needed help checking it out. I said no. I checked it out. I read it.
No one can stop you from reading anything at the library. No librarian will tell you not to read a certain book. They might suggest a book to you, but they won’t tell you not to read anything.
One of the questions on the job interview I did to get a job at the library was basically “the library’s policy is to let anyone checkout anything. a child comes to the checkout desk with a book with a nude figure on the cover. what do you do?”
The correct answer is you let that child check out that book.
That’s library policy. The library would back me up on this if a parent got angry at me.
As a library worker I sometimes helped kids find scary books in the adult section. Never had to deal with the hypothetical nude, haha. But plenty of times where I would have to check with a kid if it was okay if I walked them out of the section their parents left them in to take them to the adult section of the library. But other than that, I let kids read what they wanted. It was their parents’ job to talk to them about what they were reading, not mine. And I knew that some parents would be very permissive and some were very controlling. It was not my job to make judgements or parent anyone’s kids. It was my job to let anyone checkout anything they wanted to read. There are suggested age categories at the library, but no age restriction on the books in the library.
Most libraries these days have self check-out machines. It’s possible that an individual librarian might go against library policy and balk at letting a kid check out Last Exit to Brooklyn, but these days you often don’t even need to go through them.
(Looking through the notes it looks like some libraries in some states have separate kid cards, but I’ve never been in one that did.)
Librarian here! If you don’t want your kid to look at certain materials, don’t leave them unsupervised in the library! It’s not my job to parent your child. It’s yours.
