In the previous section, it was discussed that restricting access to things makes them perceivably more valuable and therefore, more likely to be consumed or sought out, thereby essentially proving that banning something is an ineffective way to deal with it. We have now learned the why of censorship—why banning something doesn’t work. Now we need to find out the what of censorship—what happens to the mental, emotional and intellectual development of an adolescent who has been banned from information.

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    Books are banned for many different reasons as far as context goes, but in general, information is banned or restricted because there is something seemingly offensive or dangerous about it. And, generally speaking, literary books with sensitive content tend to sit uneasily with protective or overprotective parents; often times, the parents of the readers do not believe their children to be ready to handle the information a book may or may not discuss; they believe the information is damaging or harmful to the child, and that it will cause the child trauma in some way. In an attempt to shield children from the dangers of (possibly) mature content, parents will challenge a book in the hopes of having it removed from either the public or school library, thereby eliminating the child’s access to the material. (In this instance, we are excluding retail bookstores as sources for information, as most children under 16 do not have jobs and therefore cannot buy items as easily as adults can.) When parents are reactive to material and attempt to take it away, by preventing a child access to discomforting ideas, not only does the material become more interesting (as discussed in the previous section), but it also influences the child’s psychological development.

 

    Paul Bohn, a practicing psychiatrist at UCLA, gave a seminar about the topic, stating that “many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment” (Gottlieb, 2011). However, this is detrimental to the child. While it may seem counterproductive or even cruel to allow children to feel discomfort (physical or emotional, mild or moderate), it is actually essential to their mental development that they experience these feelings. By preventing children from feeling discomfort—some parents see this as protecting their children—they and are, in fact causing serious developmental damage that can last for decades after childhood has passed. Experiencing discomfort throughout childhood enables children to gain coping skills that they will rely on heavily when they eventually become adults. Without these experiences, the coping mechanisms do not develop and the child will become a maladjusted adult.

 

    In early childhood, discomfort generally stems from shock, a feeling that an experience is unfamiliar, and therefore, frightening to them. It is only through experience that they are able to overcome this fear and learn to cope independently from the comfort of their parents. In the face of such discomfort, Bohn says, children must be given a chance to “experience...confusion… figure out what just happened…and then briefly…grapple with the frustration” (Gottlieb, 2011) of the situation. When a child is given the freedom to go through this process in its entirety, they develop the necessary coping mechanisms; while a parent may provide comfort, it is vital to the process that the child works through the incident on their own for the initial portion of the time. Time spent coping alone helps the child develop stronger feelings of security (Gottlieb, 2011) in that it teaches children that even “if something unpleasant happens, [they] can get through it” (Gottlieb, 2011), meaning they learn to be a little less reliant on others. Although children will still be fairly reliant on their parents, as they are still young, this solitary struggle plants the seeds for future independence. According to Bohn, “in many instances… the child recovers fine on [their] own” (Gottlieb, 2011). Providing comfort shortly after something negative has happened strengthens the impact the comfort will make on the child, as it proves that, even when scary or painful things happen, comfort is not far away (Gottlieb, 2011). Thus this mental process teaches resilience, endurance and independence, even with the parent’s help.

 

    Bohn states that parents tend to interfere with their children’s growth, often jumping in too soon, “protecting their kid when [they don’t] need protection” (Gottlieb, 2011). Parents believe providing instant comfort to a child is helpful. However, Bohn says that this results in a child who “has no idea what discomfort feels like and will have no framework for how to recover when [they feel] discomfort” (Gottlieb, 2011). There are no coping mechanisms for the everyday frustrations of life, because prior to adulthood, the individual didn’t have any frustrations. When the individul experiences discomfort in adulthood, they do not know how to handle themselves or the situation; they become anxious and often times resort to turning to their parents for constant for help and comforts, “instead of attempting to figure out how to deal with it themselves” (Gottlieb, 2011). Parents that are too caring, too comforting, too protective, create children that become emotionally dependent on the parent, and therefore become helpless in the face of obstacles, no matter how major or minor. This can result in a variety of future symptoms.

 

    Lori Gottlieb, author, clinical psychologist and colleague of Bohn, states that many of her patients happen to be young adults (early 20’s to early 30’s) that feel anxious, depressed and overall unhappy for unknown reasons (2011); it has been proven that mental and emotional disorders are more and more common with each new generation (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015) Furthermore, all of Gottlieb’s patients described their childhoods in a similar way: they had extremely attentive, providing parents and generally happy childhoods. It is because of this that Gottlieb and Bohn both agree that overprotective and over nurturing parents can cause psychological damage to their children, even without knowing it or meaning to. By trying to shield children from emotional or physical pains, parents teach their children that they are incapable of handling stress (2011). Without these experiences, children cannot develop what child psychologist and author Dan Kindlon calls psychological immunity (Gottlieb, 2011). In the same way our bodies build up immunities to keep us from getting sick constantly, the mind needs “exposure to discomfort...and struggle” (Gottlieb, 2011) in order to stay healthy. A child who does not understand hardship will become an adult who “break down anytime things don’t go their way” (Gottlieb, 2011). In a sense, overprotective parents are mentally and emotionally crippling their children. Instead of developing a mental disorder, as Gottlieb discusses, like anxiety or depression, an alternate side effect of overprotection could be aggression (Hadit & Lukianoff, 2015). Overprotected and emotionally inexperienced children mature into maladjusted adults who not only can’t encounter something uncomfortable, but may even refuse to. This refusal can manifest in negative, aggressive ways.

 

    A huge issue with discomfort is that it can be caused by virtually anything; it depends heavily on the person. Sometimes it is the physical pain of a scraped knee, other times it is the emotional disappointment of getting cut from team try outs, still other times it is the mental anxiety that comes from learning. This concept is referred to as accommodation, a term coined by Jean Piaget that explains how we make sense of the world.

 

    Piaget believed that humans are “born with schemes operating at birth that he called ‘reflexes’” (Huitt & Hummel, 2003); these schemes (reflexes) can also be described as inborn knowledge that is used for survival. As a child grows and is exposed to more of their environment, the schemes likewise grow, and become more complex (2003). Piaget theorized there are two ways in which we learn: through the cognitive processes of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is “the process of using…the environment so that it can be placed in preexisting cognitive structures” (Huitt & Hummel, 2003), meaning that, when we encounter something new, we force the new information to fit into ideas we already have. An example of this would be a child mistakenly confusing a balding man and a clown, due to the two having similar hairstyles (McLeod, 2009). In contrast, accommodation is “the process of changing cognitive structures in order to accept something from the environment” (Huitt & Hummel, 2003). This means accommodation occurs when the information gathered through previous experience does not apply to the situation at hand, and the individual must change their way of thinking (their scheme) in order to make sense of what they are experiencing. An example of this would be the child from the previous example noticing the differences in behavior and appearance between the balding man and a clown, thereby changing and refining their idea of what a clown actually is (McLeod, 2009).  Piaget believed that people—both children and adults alike, as both continuously learn—experience a mental discomfort when utilizing these processes, as it disturbs an individual’s equilibrium (the “balance between schemes and the environment” [Huitt & Hummel, 2003]). Thus, in certain circumstances, learning can be uncomfortable. This can be especially true for children with overprotective parents.

 

    Discomfort can also stem from encountering foreign or uncomfortable ideas. In regards to censorship, foreign topics discussed within texts can lead to accommodation, and the mental discomfort associated with obtaining new ideas. Books are not just sources of entertainment, they are also learning tools—a book does not need to be strictly academic to be educational. Knowledge is amassed through experience and exposure, assimilation and accommodation. With this information in mind, it is easy to see how excessive protection and censorship can damage children--and the adults they will become-- psychologically.

 

    Books are banned or censored because of vulgar, sexual, mature or saddening topics. The main argument is exposure to ideas of this nature is damaging or traumatizing to the child. However, ignoring these topics and providing excessive (over) protection, as discussed in this section, is actually what damages children. Reading is another way children can develop the psychological immunity they need in order to survive. The pain conveyed through an author’s words can trigger accommodation and force the child to reassess what they thought they knew, thus helping them become more intelligent, emotionally mature and understanding individuals; reading is a safe and efficient way for children to receive exposure to the discomforts of real life without having to personally experience it (Flood, 2013). Working through a painful experience, as stated by Gottlieb, Bohn, Kindlon, and many others, helps the child develop life-long coping mechanisms for real world problems.

 

    Additionally, having a child question these topics provides a chance for the parent to not only teach, but bond with their child. It is much more effective to discuss and provide comfort instead of a parent attempting to erase (prevent) a negative experience completely with seemingly benign lies or ‘sweet nothings’ (e.g. Don’t worry, I would never let something like that happen to you). In letting a child experience discomfort, children come to learn that parents will be present to help them through whatever is happening. This not only helps the child become “more emotionally secure” (Gottlieb, 2011), but also more trusting of the parent. Thus making any comfort the parent provides far more influential (Gottlieb, 2011). Furthermore, reading about the hardships of others (fictional literature) teaches and increases empathy (O’Connell, 2014), a quality that the digital age is actually eliminating from the human brain and interactions (Przybylski & Weinstein, 2013; Wagner, 2015). This is especially troubling for academic fields. New studies show that uncomfortable ideas on college campuses are in threat of censorship from an unlikely source.

 

    Reporter Erica Hellerstein, author and constitutional lawyer Greg Lukianoff, and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt discuss a new trend among college students: student-imposed censorship for the sake of emotional health (2016; 2015). According to Lukianoff and Haidt, today’s college students want “to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense” (2015) in an attempt to protect themselves-- notice the key word ‘discomfort’! It seems today’s young adults are having an adverse emotional reaction to uncomfortable ideas and want campus policies to reflect their own personal ones, rather than accepting any discrepancies. In extreme instances, things like spelling/ grammar corrections, clapping and small talk have been banned from campuses (Wold, 2015). However, censorship will only make the problem worse: avoiding what gives one anxiety (discomfort) does not soothe or resolve the anxiety (Hadit & Lukianoff, 2015). Avoidance (censorship) validates the fear, makes it harder to encounter and harder to overcome. Hellerstein states that some groups of college students “can, and have, gone too far in their calls for suppressing ‘hateful’ speech” (2016), or foreign ideals. Meanwhile Will Creeley, who is the vice president of legal and public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, claims “there seem to be a worrying number of instances where students are asking the authorities to sanction or punish speech that they disagree with” (Creeley via Hellerstein, 2016). While there may be other factors at play here--political involvement for one-- Lukianoff and Haidt point out that Millennials, anyone born in 1980 or later, were the first generation to have actively protective parents; Millennials “got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm” (2015). This seems to suggest that the first generation to receive extra-to- overprotective parental attention has also become a generation of adults, in their 20’s and 30’s, that seem to be struggling with sources of discomfort.

 

    Discomfort can come from anywhere, and parents cannot protect their children from every possible pain that they may or may not encounter. It is, quite simply, impossible. Therefore, it is crucial to the child’s development that they be taught about life before going out into the world, with no experience, to live it. Without the chance to explore negative experiences, emotions and thoughts, children are turned into fragile shells of the adults they could be. By allowing our children to experience sadness, anger, fear, disappointment, we are giving them a priceless tool that they will rely on for their entire adult lives.

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