Should There Be F-Bombs in YA Novels?

[image description: a young Black girl running her fingers along the spines of books stacked on a bookshelf]

The half a dozen writing groups I’m in on Facebook never cease to fascinate me. When people ask questions in the group, it’s not uncommon to get several hundred replies, depending on the size of that particular group and the question being asked. Recently, someone asked this:

Hello all,
What are your thoughts about using swear words in a book aimed at 13 to 15-year-olds?
There are very few in the 30,000 words and it's only the f word.
Thanks.

This question got some spirited debate ranging from people telling her they’d never buy such a book for their kids to people saying it was just how teenagers talked. Then they started debating whether teenagers actually cursed. “Not my child!” some parents decried. Then the parents got into a debate about how much their kids share with them and how their attitude might change when they’re talking to their parents versus talking to their friends.

It turned into something of a free for all, so I weighed in even though I normally scroll past Facebook debates. I read 150+ books a year, a portion of them YA novels, so here’s what I had to say…

“Fuck” is nothing they haven't heard before and probably said themselves.

I can't help feeling that the folks who are super opposed to having "fuck" in a book aimed at teenagers must not know very many teenagers. And if they're parents then, of course, their kids aren't going to curse around them. That doesn't mean the kids don't curse or hear curse words regularly. If you had asked my family when I was a teenager if I cursed, they’d have told you no, but that didn’t stop me and my friends from doing it. I’m sure there are some teens out there who don’t curse, but even the ones who don’t still know what cursing is.

Part of the reason YA is such an expansive, popular genre is that the characters often escape the bounds of puritanical notions of parenting. The characters might have strict parents and other authority figures in their lives, but they're actively working to subvert them. Including saying “fuck.” YA as a genre is all about teens finding agency and exercising their autonomy through whatever conflicts the novel presents. Some teens choose to exercise agency and autonomy via cursing, so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with including it in a YA.

I’m not over here saying to throw “fuck” into board books and bedtime stories, but parents need to understand that just because their kids will always be their little babies doesn’t mean their kids are actually babies. Treating them like babies will only make them resent the adults in their lives who treat them as such, and may even encourage them to rebel. (That’s what happened with me. My family kept treating me like a baby regardless of how old I was, so I started cursing intentionally as a way of asserting myself.)

That’s my two cents. What do you think?