What are libraries for?

Not just books, apparently

About ten years ago, one of my daughters, who had walked to the nearby neighborhood branch of the local library, came home upset. I think she was about eight years old. One of the librarians had asked her where her parents were, and when she reported that her parents were at home, she was informed (gently, I am sure) that she was not allowed to be in the library by herself. The rule was that children under twelve could not be in the library without an adult.

I was mortified, horrified, dismayed, perturbed, and more. This rule seemed like some sort of monstrous mash-up of tiger-momming, helicopter-parenting (or helicopter-librarianing), “liability” culture (whenever an institution defends a rule by pointing to “liability,” you ought to smell BS in the air), bureaucratic nonsense, and who knows what else.

One of the nice things about living in a close-knit neighborhood in a small town is that one may know the head librarian. As I did. I sent him an email, and he called me right away. And what he said—nicely, patiently—was that they had to implement the no-children-under-twelve rule, because some parents had been dropping their children off, during summer vacation, and leaving them in the library all day—using the library as child-care, while the parents went to work. “In some cases,” the librarian said, “the children were very young, six or seven, and the parents didn’t even leave them with lunch.” So the librarians were having to act as babysitters, for hours on end.

This story blew my mind. So much to think about. Here were parents who had to keep working, who could not find affordable child-care, turning to a public institution they trusted—the library—to watch their children. On the one hand, there is something almost heartwarming about it: how good it is that these parents trust the library, and the librarians, with their children. And how moving that they would put their children among books all day, as a form of entertainment (whether or not the children had phones or tablets, I don’t know).

On the other hand, there is the obvious sadness: the lack of child care, the lack of choices, the breakdown of kinship or family or neighborhood structures, the parents facing a poverty of options. And the children, who are expected to be self-sufficient, or dependent on librarians, for hours at a time.

Then there is the heroism of the librarians, looking after these children. Not their job, but they did it anyway.

All of which is to say: I totally understood why the head librarian, to support his staff, began forbidding children from being in the library unsupervised. And yet, being unsupervised in the library can be one of the great joys of a bookish childhood. For my children, it was freedom; for some other children, it was necessity. For my daughter, being alone in the library at age eight was precocity; for other children—perhaps also precocious—it was babysitting.

I want a society in which children can escape to the library. Here I think about the boy for whom Portnoy is always finding books, in the Newark library, in Portnoy’s Complaint. And I think about all the children who want to search for books, on so many topics, far from their parents’ prying eyes. But I also want a society in which librarians are not expected to do more than the bookish tasks they are trained to do.

(Courtesy Creative Commons License)

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Except… It turns out that librarians have long been expected to do more than bookish tasks, and the expectations grow every day.