Kids, Ive recently argued, should let their they can get their hands on because at least theyre reading. Whats more, theyre loving what theyre reading.

Then I came across a Wall Street Journal article on the trend of disturbingly dark teen lit, with a pulchritude of envelope-pushing, profanity-laced tales about kidnapping, pederasty, beatings, rape, incest, suicide, drug addiction.

Suddenly, I find myself in that uncomfortable parental territory when I question a stance that I held so confidenetly just a few days earlier, when I so easily proselytized free-reading love.

Yet on the rare occasion that I see my 13-year-old son become obsessed with a book – or more often the case – fall in love with a series like post-apocalyptic, teenager-torturing The Hunger Games, I think, “Thats my boy!” As far as I see it, if hes reading, then hes not slaughtering zombies. But

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True confession: My kids go to public school. I believe in public school. But I also harbor an unseemly curiosity about the private school experience, along with a gymnasium’s worth of unresolved feelings. Sometimes as I’m dropping off my kids at their school, where there’s neither a blade of grass on the playground nor a librarian in the library, I wonder: Should my husband and I cough up the dough, go into debt, to give our children “the best”? (And what is the best anyway?) Or should we stick to our guns (and keep our clams), investing instead in the social contract underpinning the great civilizing institution of the century? Should we feel proud that we’re exposing our kids to the “real world” — the diversity, the messiness, the cultural melting pot that characterizes so many public schools and so few private ones? Or is this, in essence, forcing our children to be guinea pigs in a deplorably broken, underfunded system?

All news is bad news

And on and on it goes, the pros and cons bouncing inside my skull like rhetorical pinballs. In the past y