I have said that it is important to choose the books that teens truly love to read, it is not appealing to mothers’, fathers’, teachers’, siblings’, or classmates’, decision or trending book recommendations from social media. I don’t mean there is no bottom line for the book selection. As parents, it is your responsibility to prohibit teens from selecting the following books’ topics:

• Violence
• Pornography
• Gore
• Advocating bad habits
• Superstitious
• Excessive sadness and despair
• Hate-based ideology
• Conspiracy
• Sadistic or disturbing

Before I go forward to exploring the book recommendations, I want to go through why the contents above are hazardous to teens development.

Books Are Prohibited Teens To Read

Violence

Such a story describes the characters by using different activities to acquire something or someone and gain power, popularity, or status. Such activities include fighting, slaughter, revenge killings, tyrannical violence, and bullying like family, cyber, sexual, physical, and verbal.

Teens reading these contents develop an illusion that the only path to success is by using violence or an obsession with power to suppress the ones who don’t follow their own instructions.

There is only one path to success: struggling to work hard on oneself.

Pornography

Sexual content includes sexual senses, multi-sex relationships, sexual harassment, or playing sex games, which beautifies the plot to be more emotional, attractive, romanticized, trivialized and charming. That results in teens who have a high desire to have love affairs during their development stage being more vulnerable.

Many instances of sexual harassment are caused by acquaintances such as friends at schools or peers rather than strangers. Teens reading these contents develop an illusion that sexual activities or multi-relationships are simple, casual, and easy. From then on, teens have difficulty developing a positive attitude toward love affairs that require long-lasting, mutual respect, appreciation, and understanding.

Gore

Bloody and gore content concludes excessively detailed battle scenes in war games that vividly describe the warrior image of the character. The character always have many distinctive characteristics: virtual weapons, immortality, romanticizing war, or fighting for power.

The senses or stories that are described in the games are always virtual and do not happen in the real world. Teens are addicted to playing this type of virtual game, causing them to develop a negative value in cynicism, aggression, adversariness, empathy, social relationships, and moral judgement.

Advocating bad habits

Stores are always over-beautifying heroes’ activities of the characters in the story. Such characters are always addicted to some bad habits, such as smoking, drinking, drug abuse, bullying, truancy, and so on.

Teens reading these contents are easily fall into the role of the story, owing to having the same experiences as the teens have had before. Eventually, they try to model the characters of the story. It is important to note that once teens become addicted to bad habits, they find it difficult to give up.

Superstitious

Superstitious becomes an interesting topics if teens use it to learn more about the ceremonies in a country at certain festivals. Teens can understand how human activities and behavior are affected by traditional behavior or historic sites relating to the historical and cultural background of a country.

Books that contain superstitious content say that they can help you to acquire a better future and enhance your power in your academic or working life, such as using a spirit board like a Quija board or consulting fortune-tellers.

The result is they cannot help you anymore.

Conversely, teens obsess with reading or playing with these contents, leading them to develop hallucinations, sleep disorder, chronic anxiety and fears. They may feel that a ghost is truly following them and directing them to do some abnormal activities.

Excessive sadness and despair

Humans are easily sensitive to the feelings of death, loneliness, tragedy, despair, and neglect, causing them to sway and linger in human heart and brain for a longer time.

A common human habit: We first realize the value after losing some precious thing. As a result, many novels and films also include these contents that satisfy human desires.

Teens read these contents about bullying, neglect, and betrayal and finally leading to suicide. They can believe suicide is the way to attract public attention, and they can act in the same way is the story does.

People may think these kinds of stories can cause a positive impact on teens to think about the value of life; conversely, teens may feel more hopeless, anxious, and depressed and even more exaggerated in suicidal thoughts.

Indeed, educators, parents, psychologists and mental health professionals are not recommended to read reads that have suicide contents.

Hate-based ideology

Teens’ content contains racial slurs, moral ambiguity, political extremism, supremacy which are harmful for them to develop kindness, empathy, tolerance, friendship, equality, as well as a peaceful personality and mindset throughout personal development.

Teens reading these contents are causing them to become more offensive to society’s rules, against normal human practices, violence, lacking mutual respect, and lending their own opinions.

Moreover, teens who obsessed with the hate-based ideology are always becoming the targets of criminal groups. It is because teens discover themselves lingering on the offensive mindset and find it difficult to give up. By applying empathy and hedonism, criminals’ groups can cultivate teens to be link-minded with them.

Books Are Recommended Teens To Read

As I said before, researchers from the University of Cambridge and Warwick in the UK and Fudan University in China believed that teens who cultivate a reading habits can not only significantly give them pleasure and enjoyment but also help them in personal development. Therefore, I will categorize the book types by helping teens in their lifelong personal development.

• Sense of imagination
• Innovative ideas
• Sense of awareness
• Academic performance
• Cognitive ideas
• Entertainment
• Sense of well-being

Before I go forward to sharing the recommended book contents, I want to share my reading practices and experiences.

I love bookmarking book in my beloved bookshop, BuyBookBook. It is a bookshop that both provides retail and online platforms.

I go there at least once per week. Immersed in listening to light music and reading books in a silent and calm environment, bookmark the best books you like to read; you feel yourself totally relaxed and enlightened, as if you were being dissolved into the authors’ mind.

As I said before, a book is not a product. A book has a value. Therefore, I seldom borrow books from library. First, if the contents I have seen in books are ones that I don’t understand, I will write notes to help me remember, understand, and explore thoroughly along with the reading journey.

Most importantly, for the books I purchased, I can read them without any time limitations. Now, although I stepped out of the bookshop for over four years, I keep extreme enthusiasm, stay at least one hour a week, bookmark books, and then buy one physical book each time. As a bookworm, I can’t wait to buy a new one after I finish reading a book.

For parents, the first thing you can do is to seek out a physical bookstore nearby. Bookmarking books with them. Helping them to figure out that they are truly beloved. If your teens understand what they truly love to read and nurture sustained reading habits, they will also become bookworms and live a kind, calm, and happy lifestyle.

Sense of Imagination

Innovative Ideas

Sense of Awareness

Academic performance

Cognitive Ideas

Entertainment

Well-being

Benefits of Building Routine Reading Habit for Teens

Frequently Asked Questions