How much moral ambiguity should books for children and young adults contain?

This is a question that I’ve thought about for a while, and discussed with a fair few people. How acceptable is it for a book for children or teenagers to have unreliable narrators, really problematic themes that aren’t properly dealt with, or have a generally likeable character express a toxic opinion? Does this kind of thing need to be addressed in a way that teaches the reader the moral of the story, or is it okay to not say anything or give the reader a conflicting message, as long as they have the tools to work it out for themselves?

I’ve always been more towards the latter belief. I don’t particularly feel that stories for children or teenagers need to be moral paragons – when I was a child, I always hated it if I felt an author was trying to preach to me. I always found it more respectful if I was just given all the relevant information and allowed to make up my own mind on things. Actually, I would say that I don’t quite accept that ‘children’s literature’ and ‘young adult literature’ should even be their own categories – I was always the kid that needed their mum to take out library books for them because the library wouldn’t let me take out the books I wanted, and now I’m an adult I often go the opposite way and read things aimed at a bit of a younger readership. (Basically I like stories that make me think, and this usually means about characters who are having very different experiences to me, whether that’s because they’re a different age, live in a different time, or what-have-you.)

But recently, I’ve come across increasing numbers of people who are really quite concerned by books that have what they consider to be harmful messages in them, and they often express these views so eloquently it’s caused me to wonder if maybe I’m wrong, and a book intended to be read by a child needs to have clear moral messages for the reader to learn from. There are two particular things that have made me wonder this. The first is [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1355pfq/a_response_to_criticisms_of_love_lessons_by/) that I put up a while back regarding a Jacqueline Wilson novel that deals with a teacher-student relationship. It’s quite a controversial book, because the main character tells the story in the first person and depicts herself like the heroine of a Victorian romance, and in the end the teacher faces no consequences and it’s the young girl who gets all the blame. I go into more detail on the post, but essentially I think that this is just good storytelling – we’re given enough information about the girl and her backstory to see that she’s an extremely unreliable narrator, her vulnerability and lack of experience of healthy relationships is the reason her teacher grooms her in the first place, and the unfair treatment she gets when it’s found out feels like a commentary on the prevalence of victim-blaming in society. But given the kind of target audience of those books, there are a lot of people who think that kind of depiction is quite irresponsible and could send the wrong message.

The other example that always comes up is that there’s a perception nowadays that the *Harry Potter* books excuse slavery with the plot line about the house-elves. The suggestion throughout, that we never quite get away from, is that slavery is okay as long as the slaves aren’t abused and seem to be enjoying their lives; the character Hermione Granger sets up an organisation called SPEW to campaign for better treatment for house-elves, she’s mocked for it and eventually the plot line is kind of abandoned. Personally I’ve always thought that this matter had a lot of complexity in the way it was portrayed, as I didn’t agree with any of the characters who expressed opinions on it. Hermione was the one whose view I came closest to agreeing with, but she expressed herself so poorly, with such arrogance and superiority, that she ended up looking as bad as the people doing the enslaving – basically like a white saviour (this is also why I have some issues with the suggestion that Hermione could have been a person of colour, although I have no issues with a black actor being cast as her onstage because theatre often has actors playing characters of different ethnicities to themselves – I’ve seen siblings played onstage by actors of different skin colours in the past). This always felt like something that I as a reader was expected to think about and say, ‘Do I really agree with the conclusion these books come to? Perhaps not. Perhaps I’m not even meant to.’

To be fair, with the *Harry Potter* example I think a big part of it is also due to the fact that the author has demonstrated herself to have extremely damaging views about a lot of things over the last few years, and has caused particular harm to transgender people. Given that in the past she was seen as quite a progressive and forward-thinking person, I think there’s a perception of ‘We were wrong about her being an LGBTQ+ ally, so what other dodgy things is she hiding? Is she actually a proponent of slavery?’ I’ve been affected by this as much as anyone else; as someone in a same-sex relationship who has a lot of transgender friends, I find it a lot more difficult to enjoy *Harry Potter* as much as I once did, and there are indeed quite a few things in those books that I didn’t notice in the past that in hindsight I can see are a bit weird (for instance, Lupin and Tonks, two very obviously queer-coded characters, ending up in a heterosexual relationship with each other – I’d be very curious to know how Rowling arrived at that decision). Truthfully I have no idea what she was intending with the house-elves – I’ve given up trying to find any logic or reason to anything that woman does. But at the same time, I think it’s important to apply the same logic to it as I would with any other book, irrespective of my opinions of the author. And the book I’d make the most comparison with is *Never Let Me Go*, and the depiction of the clones. In that book, we don’t have even one rebellious character arguing that breeding humans for organ donation is wrong – the closest we get is Miss Lucy arguing that they should be told and counselled about their purpose in life from a young age. But I’ve never felt that this means I’m not allowed to oppose the idea, or that the author doesn’t, and with a book aimed primarily at adults this is accepted in a way it isn’t when it’s aimed at children.

I think critical thinking is a really important thing to teach children, and I think that the only really effective way to do that is to give them things to think critically about. I find it really hard to criticise an author for giving kids the tools to do that. But having said that, I don’t really have any experience of child development other than having vivid memories of my own childhood, and there seems to be such a feeling at the moment of literature needing to actively teach children moral values, rather than allowing them to come to their own conclusions, that I’ve started to wonder if I’ve got this wrong. I hope no one finds the question offensive – I ask in genuine good faith, I’m interested in what people have to say.

What does everyone else think? Where does one draw the line between children, YA and adult literature?

by georgemillman