I do a lot of school visits and I’ve discovered that children are much more sophisticated than we as adults give them credit for. Usually on school visits, when I read from The Watsons Go to Birmingham, I choose the first chapter, which is light and funny. But not long ago some fourth graders set me up. They said, “Read chapter 6.” Now, when I wrote the book, I didn’t think of it as a book for children; I thought of it as an adult book narrated by a ten-year-old. But then when I sent it to my editor, she told me that it was a children’s book, so we changed a lot of the language. There’s a thirteen-year-old boy who is officially a teenage juvenile delinquent, and he sounded like the juvenile delinquents I grew up with. So we changed the language, but I did keep certain words—nothing more than “hell,”  “damn,” and “ass.” That was it.

So there I was at this school, and the kids very attentively sat there and read chapter 6, and I said, “Okay,” and started to read it aloud. I don’t think there should be limitations on anything that is written, but then I got to the part where a child who wants to hang out with his older brother says, “Let’s do some cussing together.” And the older brother says, “Kiss my ass.” These fourth graders were looking at me and I read, “and then Byron said . . .” and I couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out. And the kids said, “Go ahead, we’ve already heard it; say it.” But it made me think. It made me stop and think. I don’t know if my perspective is changing because I have an eleven-year-old daughter. I don’t know if it’s changing because I’m getting older or because I have sympathy for teachers now that I’ve spent time in classrooms. I do know that it’s changing.

But I think it’s really hard to shock or to surprise children. Last year I went to Kenya and visited a private school. Usually I speak to kids who are in fifth or sixth grade, but this time they had me with second graders. These Kenyan children were wonderful. They were polite. When you walk into the classroom, they all stand up and they won’t sit down till you tell them to. I started to read my book. One of the things that Bud says in the book is “shucks”—he says “shucks” a lot. I could see that they weren’t getting it, so I explained that “shucks” is something you say in the United States if you’re frustrated, if things aren’t going the way you want them to go. I said, “There must be something that you say,” and one of the little second-graders raised his hand and said, “We say, ‘Oh, shit.’ ”

A funny moment, but this is a serious subject. My first two books were for middle readers, children about ten, eleven, twelve. The book I’m working on now is for young adults, and I find it much more liberating to write for that age group. There are so many different things that you can put into a young-adult book. I’m sometimes asked, “When are you gonna write a real book, an adult book?” But I believe that the younger your readers, the more difficult it is to know what is appropriate and what isn’t.