Given Stephanie Meyer openly shares with all who visit her website that a dream served as inspiration for her first book, Twilight, I think it is safe to say that she did not write the Twilight Saga as a means to educate young people on the subject of teen-dating.
Having read all four of her books I feel it is incumbent upon me to start off by thanking her, for as I sat with the closed cover of Breaking Dawn on my lap last December, it was clear a seed had been planted, because I have a daughter, and she has friends, because I have two sons, and they have friends…I knew I had to go back to work on a book I began many years ago, a real story, my teen-dating story void of the fairy tale.
Here is what troubles me, as a mother of three children 12, 13, and 22, and a grown woman who lived through teen dating violence when I was 17, 18, and 19. That dating experience has forever left its imprint on me, to this day I remember losing myself, the essence of who I was before meeting him. No, he was not a vampire with fabulous looks, and a bank account that was bottomless, nor did he possess the ability to materialize every time I was in danger.
No, quite the opposite was true. My boyfriend was a human being, a human being who suffered his own pain as a child. He was average to look at, some might even say he had a kind face and sweet smile, but behind those green eyes and dimples was a storm of violence. Bank account…not so much, and the danger I was in was due to his brutal behavior. His unhappy upbringing fueled a very tortured soul; his response was to possess me. Possession in the way that controls, possession that hurts, nearly kills.
According to the ACADV, one in three teenagers have experienced violence in a dating relationship. Based on those statistics as parents we need to be paying more attention, spending more time being parents. Join your kids as they pour through every Twilight Series book, and or accompany them to the movies because although Twilight is fiction, the people who are reading, watching, and being influenced are not. There are countless opportunities to guide a teenager on the subject of real life, folded into the 2,739 pages of fiction in the complete series.
[…] them to explore this genre. The books were written at a junior high reading level to draw in the teen audience post-Twilight who needed something new and sexy to fall into, as well as the non-reader who was assured by her […]