Will you check out my children’s book screening website and tell me what you think? Useful? Easy to understand?

[Red Dove]

I kept getting frustrated at the surprises my children were coming across when reading new books. But when I searched through reviews, I still was not getting an accurate picture of what topics my children may run into. My husband and I decided to develop a website for screening children’s books that is quick and to the point. 

Unlike traditional subjective reviews, our goal was to provide an objective platform. We understand that what may be suitable for one person may not be appropriate for another. Instead of relying on reviews, we encourage users to post pictures of any potentially problematic text they come across in a book.

This sharing of sensitive topics will enable other parents to discuss sensitive topics with their children or avoid materials that might not be suitable for their child's current readiness level.

If you find this resource valuable, feel free to share any sensitive content you come across. Additionally, make use of other parents' screens to save time when checking out books for your children.

The site is called ScreenItFirst.com

Edited July 21, 2023 by Red Dove

[HomeAgain]

This sounds like an overdramatic reaction and unnecessarily sheltering a child from multiple views.  Read what your kids read - there's no substitute for being able to discuss something rather than basing it on some wonky-donk review from someone else who probably didn't read it either but took things out of context.

BTW, that idea is already done.  The Good & The Beautiful has a terrible book list of "problem books" to include From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  The objections from an adult who has never read the book?  There are pictures of naked children and the protagonist and his brother steal/gamble.  I'm so glad to know that children are now safe from rough pencil sketches of children bathing in a fountain and thinks that the children are transgender. /s

 

[Nm.]

I like it.  HomeAgain did you look at the website?  It’s basically a social media platform to post pictures of the parts in a books you find unsuitable.  Others can see for themselves if it’s something they wish to avoid. 

Edited July 21, 2023 by Nm.

[El...]

I'm wondering about the limits of copyright law (which I know nothing about). But how will you keep people from posting more than is legal? I'm sure you've checked with legal types.

It's an interesting idea. I like the dispassionate, detailed parent's guides that imdb hosts about movies, because I so often don't remember things and get surprises when showing my kids a movie from my youth. This idea seems similar. 

However, a book is a lot more complex than a movie. I wonder if people will discard amazing literature because of short extracts that flip their lid without context. That would be a loss.

[ScoutTN]

It seems clear and easy to use. 

But I would not have used it as a mom of littles or middle grade kids. I just read with or before them. 

I chose books mostly on literary or artistic merit. Lots of classics and lighter on recent books. 
 

 

[Nm.]

I agree I wouldn’t remember or take the time to look up books on it.  I go by booklists, authors, and go from there.  Maybe for highschool.  However I also don’t care for popular newer Christian series that are very sanitized.  I’d rather have a few well written books (that still align with my values but were not quickly churned out) than lots of fluff.

Edited July 21, 2023 by Nm.

[HomeAgain]

3 hours ago, Nm. said:

I like it.  HomeAgain did you look at the website?  It’s basically a social media platform to post pictures of the parts in a books you find unsuitable.  Others can see for themselves if it’s something they wish to avoid. 

I don't understand how this is an argument against what I said. Thanks for seconding that it encourages taking things out of context in order to make a judgement and shelter children without bothering to know the book or what they're reading.

[Nm.]

Not an argument- just asking because you mentioned tgtb’s booklist and this isn’t anything like that.

[Tanager]

Strictly professional: I think the user interface is good, it’s simple. The icons are helpful. Though I didn’t try to add content. I did design for the digital world way back. I’m impressed, good job! BUT, It feels like the website is focusing on a certain type of book from the examples on the front page, so that can be off-putting depending on the values of the user. It seems intentional. I don’t take sides on these things online. 

My kids fly through books so it’s hard to keep up. I do try to check out things before my kids read them so in general I’d find this website helpful. My youngest has issues with any thing slightly scary or any violence in a story so if we don’t talk it through beforehand he won’t finish the book. He is young, but can read well so it’s unbalanced and I try to be careful. Death is another big one, I think it was birchbark house where a baby died, which I learned from looking the book up online. Knowing what is in a book can be so helpful. I prepared my daughter for it and she loved that series, where a friend had a very upsetting experience with it.

My daughter just finished a series she got for her bday and they had scary covers, but the cover artist obviously didn’t read the story/publishers were trying to sell the book by its cover. We had a good laugh.

[Red Dove]

4 hours ago, El... said:

However, a book is a lot more complex than a movie. I wonder if people will discard amazing literature because of short extracts that flip their lid without context. That would be a loss.

When I was working through this idea, I thought about how unfortunate it would be if people avoid a book just because there is a part in it that may be “questionable.” Because of this, I added the “Give Context” slot so the reader can add some context. 

Most of my favorite children’s books would have screens for various topics. My hope is that the users realize they don’t want to completely sanitize their child’s reading. But… they will get a heads-up on problematic topics in their family so they could either discuss it or avoid it. 

 

Thank you for the feedback, by the way. 

[HomeAgain]

16 minutes ago, Red Dove said:

When I was working through this idea, I thought about how unfortunate it would be if people avoid a book just because there is a part in it that may be “questionable.” Because of this, I added the “Give Context” slot so the reader can add some context. 

Most of my favorite children’s books would have screens for various topics. My hope is that the users realize they don’t want to completely sanitize their child’s reading. But… they will get a heads-up on problematic topics in their family so they could either discuss it or avoid it. 

 

Thank you for the feedback, by the way. 

Red Dove, I think you should consider your intended audience.  People don't work the way you want them to.

 

[kirstenhill]

OP, I wish you all the best with your project.  I personally like discussing age-appropriateness of books and potential content considerations "in community" so to speak, and I'm a part of a couple of book related Facebook groups where we do just that.   I think it might be an uphill battle to get users to remember to take photos of a book as they notice various potential content concerns.    I like sharing considerations along with writing reviews, because then I can just summarize at the end what I've noticed.

As far as the other conversation going on in the thread about content considerations in general, I think there's always room for differences of opinion on what books should be read or not, or what's appropriate at a given age, and the best place to do that is in the home rather than have censoring happen at a school or library level.  There's a lot of things I would allow my 16 year old to read (basically, I would let him read just about anything unless it was graphic s*x scenes), but plenty of things I would ask my 11 year old to wait to read until he's a bit older.   I also have a strong personal distaste for books with ghosts that turn out to be actual spirits of dead people.  I have no trouble with handing them over to my kids as my avoidance isn't for moral reasons, but I just don't want to read them myself.  There was a book DD and I read together several years ago where that turned out to be the whole surprise "premise" of the book...I was so annoyed, because I would have picked a different book for her and I to share together had I known.   Content considerations are great for personal preferences like that too.

[Servant4Christ]

I can't wait to look. This sounds like a tool that would've been very helpful for my oldest when he was younger. He could read at a much higher level than his age/maturity could handle and as often as I tried to screen for content ahead of time, this kid could really fly through the books! I had a serious oops moment with 2 particular books (a series) that were not properly described and nothing in the reviews indicated certain content that was quite shocking and I did exactly this: I posted pictures of the exact pages/content in an Amazon review so parents looking could make an informed decision.

[Red Dove]

10 hours ago, Tanager said:

Strictly professional: I think the user interface is good, it’s simple. The icons are helpful. Though I didn’t try to add content. I did design for the digital world way back. I’m impressed, good job! BUT, It feels like the website is focusing on a certain type of book from the examples on the front page, so that can be off-putting depending on the values of the user. It seems intentional. I don’t take sides on these things online. 

My kids fly through books so it’s hard to keep up. I do try to check out things before my kids read them so in general I’d find this website helpful. My youngest has issues with any thing slightly scary or any violence in a story so if we don’t talk it through beforehand he won’t finish the book. He is young, but can read well so it’s unbalanced and I try to be careful. Death is another big one, I think it was birchbark house where a baby died, which I learned from looking the book up online. Knowing what is in a book can be so helpful. I prepared my daughter for it and she loved that series, where a friend had a very upsetting experience with it.

My daughter just finished a series she got for her bday and they had scary covers, but the cover artist obviously didn’t read the story/publishers were trying to sell the book by its cover. We had a good laugh.

Thank you for your professional input! As far as the type of book showing up on the front page, I can see how that may make it seem like we are focusing on a certain topic. The books on the home page are randomly selected from screened books, They’re set to refresh every 2 or 3 days. They just so happened to be heavy on one topic, I submitted a ticket to the developer to add some logic to try to better balance results on the homepage.

Thank you for your personal input as well. When my children were younger, I read The Trumpeter of Krakow before giving it to them. There was a scene in it that was too dark for what my children could handle. Now that they are older, I would have no problem giving the book to some of my children. Instances like that are what inspired this website. I just can’t keep up with pre-reading for one of my children, let alone all 6 of my children. 

[Tanager]

1 minute ago, Red Dove said:

better balance results on the homepage.

I’ve been thinking about this... I liked seeing an upfront example of how it works by clicking on recently uploaded. That could also be accomplished by a simple rotating feature explanation. I’d love to see all those icons of how things are categorized right away too... maybe a thought for version 2.0

Or you could show less books and also feature books that didn’t show any flags (I liked that category). Plus having book suggestions is always a bonus.

Or keep it how it is, the Logic sounds like it could help if things got heavy in an area. Over all, congrats!

[Dianthus]

I'm not reading all the comments but I check book reviews and common sense media constantly. I read books and watched movies that I shouldn't have as a child so always check reviews on unknown (to me) books before ordering from the library or for purchase. I think it's great to have another book review source! Your website interface is easy to follow. Thanks for this effort!

 

[Clarita]

I think that having the category boxes you have to click into not helpful, I'd rather have description then I click in further to see the offending page. Also in one of the books there was a MISC. category which really confused me. I wonder if that would have been better as a "to be categorized" or something.

I do like how the passage is included, but I don't know if that runs into trouble with copyrighting stuff. (I think it's basically fully cited so maybe not an issue.)

I do agree with @HomeAgain that there are people who are going to censor books for their kids for the wrong reasons. I think this is different from booklists like TGTB because that booklist (and some others like it) never tell me what the offending material actually is. For me the TGTB booklist just gives me a ranking on the books. It's weird because they rank a lot of just educational books as low on moral; I'm not sure what that means (are those backyard critters committing mass murder??). Other booklist just list a bunch of books that the blogger finds offensive or OK. 

Yes I should read all the books my kids read, but I have a prolific 6 year old reader and I'm not interested enough in dragons and kid spies to read through all the books he reads to discuss problematic issues with him. Usually I find out after he starts repeating things from those books to start that discussion. Kudos for the parents that do read all the books their children read. 

[Red Dove]

9 hours ago, Dianthus said:

I'm not reading all the comments but I check book reviews and common sense media constantly. I read books and watched movies that I shouldn't have as a child so always check reviews on unknown (to me) books before ordering from the library or for purchase. I think it's great to have another book review source! Your website interface is easy to follow. Thanks for this effort!

 

Thank you for taking the time to review the site. 

One of the most unexpected benefits for me is discovering new books and perspectives. If you can recall some of those inappropriate books from your childhood, having your viewpoint would be very helpful in guiding families towards positive content.

[8filltheheart]

@Red Dove I really like the idea of being able to read why parents found an issue with the book.  I absolutely censor what my younger kids can read. I'm 100% for sheltering young kids from alternative viewpoints that I disagree with morally and our counter to our family's worldview. Skimming through the books I found some that I have no problem with based on what was posted and some that wouldn't make it into our home. Being able to read the sections was helpful. 

I would find the site more useful if you were able to categorize books by reading level or age group and if parents were able to recommend books based on content.   Sometimes parents want to look for books and don't have a specific title in mind.  If they could scan through your site and sort them, it might be helpful.

[Red Dove]

On 7/23/2023 at 5:10 AM, 8filltheheart said:

@Red Dove I really like the idea of being able to read why parents found an issue with the book.  I absolutely censor what my younger kids can read. I'm 100% for sheltering young kids from alternative viewpoints that I disagree with morally and our counter to our family's worldview. Skimming through the books I found some that I have no problem with based on what was posted and some that wouldn't make it into our home. Being able to read the sections was helpful. 

I would find the site more useful if you were able to categorize books by reading level or age group and if parents were able to recommend books based on content.   Sometimes parents want to look for books and don't have a specific title in mind.  If they could scan through your site and sort them, it might be helpful.

Thank you for your input! We have gotten quite a few people who want to search books based on category without specific books in mind. Since that is a common desire, we are going to work on that for the next phase. Right now, we are going to focus on a big push for screening books. Once we have enough screened books, we will start the next phase of sorting and categorizing the books. Since we just rolled the website out to the public, we don’t have enough screened books to make the categories and filters useful.