We Collect and Read These Banned Books to Our Child. Here's why...

You know we LOVE books in this house. 

Once we found out that she liked books as much as we did, we intentionally created space and access to books for our daughter. 

We curated age-appropriate stories, poems, and funny rhymes and made sure that whenever she wanted to read if we could, we would stop whatever we were doing to read to her.

One book list we are actively purchasing from for our little reader is a bit more controversial than The Hungry Caterpillar, and that is the books on the Banned/Challenge list. 

Unlike books that are actually harmful because they share dangerous or harmful ideas, these books encourage self-love for people who may be in historically marginalized communities. 

Unfortunately, this was enough to land them on the Central York Pennsylvania banned list, and no real reason was given as to why (although we KNOW why). The only folks who don't like that are folks who don't want us or their own kids to have access to such books. 

So, in my own brand of petty, I proudly purchased them for my own child. Now she has a growing library of these books and we are encouraging our fellow parents to do the same.

I had the opportunity to write about this for Parents some time ago, choosing my top 10 for Kindred, Parent's Black Families publication. For my full list of Banned Books worth being in your child's library, head to Parents.com