What Changes During Adolescence?

Find a therapist to support kids and teens

A study found that reading banned books predicted civic engagement more strongly than personality traits.

Reading banned books showed zero correlation with grades, violent crime, or nonviolent crime in adolescents.

Reactance theory explains why censorship backfires: Restricted freedoms activate curiosity and thinking.

Books kids choose for pleasure predicted higher GPAs while assigned school reading showed no such effect.

We talk about a lot of strange things in my Psychology 417: Science of Well-Being class. Several years ago, a student told me why she signed up even though she’s an engineering major.

She was 13 when she discovered most adults were full of crap. Now, most teenagers figure this out through the absurdity of 9pm curfews (because older kids have a different circadian rhythm) or arguments in which “Because I said so” is considered authoritative. Standing in front of a middle-school librarian, trying and failing to check out The Catcher in the Rye (most of all because it was not a book for girls), her self-talk repeated this is shite. As she waited for a decent explanation, all the librarian did was stand there, fingers drumming on the circulation desk.

She then found the book on a cart labeled “To Be Rearranged” in the back corner of the library. Someone’s parent had complained. The district had responded with enthusiastic efficiency.

Don’t get the character of this woman wrong: She is not a political activist with pink hair. She knows plenty of kids get told no every day and survive just fine. She merely relayed the moment when adults making decisions about what she could handle had no idea what she could handle. You would have thought they had an idea what she was dealing with in terms of bullying, big emotions, and all the rest. But they had no idea that protecting her from Holden Caulfield’s profanity-laced despair was absurd when her own confusion about (failing to) belong was far more cruel/crude.

The student found the book and read it in a week. When she finished, she did not feel corrupted. Now, she started paying attention to other people and the power they really did not have over her. Some might call this agency and empowerment. If so, we will get along….

Do you know that the book banners were right? Just not in the way they thought.

Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist interested in moral panics decided to study what happens when kids read books that adults don’t want them reading. He surveyed 282 adolescents aged 12 to 18, gave them a list of 30 commonly challenged books (everything from Harry Potter to Huckleberry Finn to The Hunger Games), and measured grades, prosocial behavior, mental health, criminal activity.

What he found was that reading banned books had zero effect on grades. Zero effect on violent crime. Zero effect on nonviolent crime. The correlation between banned book exposure and GPA was so microscopic it might as well have been a mite on a football field.

The censors and their lame supporters might start sweating if they read the article and discovered that kids who read more banned books showed significantly more positive community engagement. More interest in politics and elections. More involvement in charitable causes. The standardized regression coefficient for banned books predicting civic behavior was β = .23 (a meaningful effect, but please don’t let me bore you with the details, and the strongest predictor in the model after you account for personality, family, and peer influences).

For those who despise statistics, another way of saying this is that banned books were a better predictor of making the local community better than secure family attachments, positive peer influences, and personality traits such as agreeableness and emotional stability and openness to experience.

Pretty amazing, and it's pretty amazing that nobody is talking about this in these conversations!

The book banners accidentally created better citizens. Why? Because censorship fails in the most spectacular way possible. Sharon and Jack Brehm figured this out in the 1960s and 1970s with reactance theory. When people perceive a threat to their freedom, they experience psychological arousal that motivates them to restore that freedom. Tell a teenager they cannot read something, and you have ramped up their curiosity to read said book and wonder what else they must do from the list of unacceptable actions. It becomes about autonomy, or the fundamental human drive to make your own choices about what enters your own mind.

What Changes During Adolescence?

Find a therapist to support kids and teens

Of note, reactance doesn’t make kids only read the forbidden book. It makes them care about why it was forbidden. It activates critical thinking about power, control, and who gets to decide what’s dangerous. It builds the cognitive muscles that a functioning democracy requires and, supposedly, what schools are supposed to train kids in.

Three kids passing around a contraband copy of a challenged novel during lunch could be alternatively viewed as an act of civic engagement. Last time I checked, solidarity and resource sharing and questioning authority when it oversteps bounds is literally how every meaningful social movement in American history started.

Ferguson’s study also raised some questions about mental health panicking. The relationship between banned books and psychological symptoms was driven by a tiny subset, about 7% of the sample, who were both heavy readers of challenged books and already had elevated mental health symptoms. For the other 93% of kids? Nothing. No depression. No anxiety. No behavioral problems.

Of course, some methodology issues deserve attention, as they always do. Ferguson couldn’t determine whether those 7% were being harmed by the books or seeking them out because the books spoke to what they were experiencing. They might have doing exactly what a thoughtful person in pain would do, which is search for stories that offer insight. Banning or censoring books doesn’t protect that 7%. It strips them of the language to understand what they’re going through. It removes the evidence that other humans have survived what they’re surviving.

A barely mentioned scientific finding worth savoring is that reading for pleasure predicted higher GPAs while assigned school reading did not. Your kid’s teacher is not the master of their future intellect and wisdom; the books kids choose make them smarter. The books adults force on them don’t move the needle. Which means every school board that removes a book a kid wants to read and replaces it with an approved text nobody asked for is working against academic achievement.

You cannot make this stuff up.

So here’s my message to everyone losing their minds over whatever book they have deemed too dangerous for young eyes this year: Thank you.

Thank you for making those books irresistible.

Thank you for transforming apathetic teenagers into passionate advocates for intellectual freedom.

Thank you for teaching kids that authority figures often don’t know what they’re talking about, that rules aren’t always just, that sometimes the most important thing you can do is seek out what someone told you to avoid.

You are not protecting children: Every list of challenged titles becomes a curiosity-inducing reading list.

Every attempt to control what young people think becomes a class in why young people should think for themselves.

The kids are fine. Better than fine. They’re volunteering. They’re helping other kids and adults. They are developing the critical thinking skills that make them able to see through misinformation and decoys. And they do it not despite your censorship, but because of it.

Keep banning books. Seriously. You are doing more for creating a healthy society than any curriculum committee in the country.

© Psychology Today