Out of Darkness pod2

The Parents Are Now podcast aims to help parents understand kids' culture and improve parenting skills. They will discuss book bans in schools and why it's important for children to be educated about topics like race, gender, culture, and sexuality. The book "Out of Darkness" by Ashley Hope Perez is being considered for banning due to offensive dialogue. The book explores a tragic event in 1937 and addresses racial and social issues. It is important for children to learn about these issues to prevent them from recurring. Parents should focus on teaching good social skills rather than sheltering children from these topics. Good evening listeners, welcome to the Parents Are Now podcast, a podcast centered around keeping parents up-to-date on everything that's kids' culture. Our goal here is to help parents create better parenting skills and develop the ability to better understand what's going on in their kids' lives today. In the next few weeks, we'll be talking about book bans going on in schools. I thought book bans would be a good topic since, as of recently, we have seen more of these book bans become more common across the country. Knowledge is super important in everyday life and we want our children to be educated when it comes to things like race, gender, culture, and sexuality. Some of these are obviously age-sensitive topics and are only appropriate for young adults, but for the most part, our kids need to be educated in these fields because it helps them develop social skills and understand other people better. We will be discussing why these books are controversial and how they are considered educational as well as examining why they shouldn't be banned or should be banned. This week, the book we're discussing is Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez. It was published in 2015. The book has been in school libraries for a little over five years and up till 2022, it became one of the books that are being pushed for more banning due to some offensive or potentially offensive and sexual dialogue that occurs between a group of young boys talking about the main character, Naomi, when she first walks into the classroom. Ultimately, the book is about an explosion that happened at a school in New London, Texas in 1937. It was a very tragic event. There was a lot of people that died. The story follows a young Mexican girl named Naomi and an African-American boy named Wash. The book also follows their love affair. I read the book and found the book hard to read due to the depictions of the historical tragedy. While reading the book, I did not find it pornographic nor obscene, which is one of the reasons why most of these book bans have been occurring. I found that the book includes many racial and social issues that were happening at the time. People may have a problem with their kids reading this because they don't want their kids to know about the racism that's occurred in the country's past and all that stuff. But it's important for our children to understand the racial issues that have occurred in the past so we don't repeat them. As parents, it's our job to make sure that doesn't happen. Having an understanding of systemic oppression, racism, and discrimination is important all around the world. It will also help our children to have a better understanding of social issues in the country, which ultimately helps combat future occurrences. It's a parent's job to ensure that their kids get proper education on things like gender, race, and ethnicity so they can properly navigate themselves through the world that we live in. You can't protect your kids from experimenting or having sex because it's all going to happen eventually. But what you can do is teach them not to be a racist, and I think that's super important. These books help depict things that happened at these times, and I think that these should be allowed in school libraries. Teaching your kid good social skills and helping them have a better understanding of these things is much more beneficial to kids than trying to shelter them from these social issues. But that's going to be all time we have for this episode of Parents Now Podcast. Thanks for tuning in and listening. We'll see you all later for another episode.