Is The Handmaid’s Tale A Suitable Choice for 13-Year-Old Suri Cruise?

There's a strange freedom afforded to you when you're a child who loves to read. While your parents might obsessively regulate the films, TV and video games that you consume, the books that you pick are largely left unsupervised. In houses where sugar is kept under lock and key and screen time is more highly regulated than the banks, reading is often a totally free activity where you're allowed to pull books off the shelves as you see fit.

It's probably because parents are delighted that their children are reading at all. All of the research suggests that reading is one of the most important things for children to do. Plus, it is almost a sort of status symbol to have a bookish child.

One such apparently bookish child is Suri Cruise, who is reading Margaret Atwood's terrifying dystopian classic The Handmaid's Tale, despite being 13 years old. (Is anyone else genuinely astonished that Suri is 13?)

The book, if you haven't read it, is about a world in which women who are able to have babies are forced to do so, lending their wombs to high-profile and powerful couples who are infertile. It's not exactly light reading.

Now you might be thinking that Suri's probably had enough exposure to controlling pseudo-religious structures to last her a lifetime, but clearly she's enjoying the book, which she was spotted carrying while out and and about with her mum Katie Holmes yesterday.

Most parents are delighted when their offspring read outside of their age range because it's a sign of intelligence and curiosity. I only ever remember being praised for picking up books intended for adults before I'd reached puberty, and I loved the freedom that reading afforded me. I'd have been furious if anyone had tried to stop me from reading adult books as a child, and yet doing so wasn't without its pitfalls.

I read The Handmaid's Tale around the same age as Suri – and it terrified me. Around the same time I read The Woman in Black, The Story of O and Bridget Jones' Diary, which meant that I was simultaneously scared of authoritarian states, ghosts, sex and being unmarried in my thirties.

Of course it's up to each individual parent what they let their children read, and unlike films and video games, books don't have age limits. Teenagers can stroll into a library or a bookshop and pick up anything which appeals to them. In some ways that's brilliant; it means that intellectual curiosity isn't hemmed in by boundaries and that young people are able to build a lifelong relationship with reading.

But by the same token, if we're careful about what kids watch, surely we should also at least be aware of what they read? After reading various books about nuclear holocaust I was unable to sleep for several months, obsessed that the world was going to end in a fiery apocalypse.

It seems that because books aren't visual they're assumed to not have the capacity to terrorise, but that's entirely untrue and underestimates the power of fiction. A well written book can be every bit as distressing and disturbing as a film or a TV show.

Publishing experts take an open-minded stance on whether or not you should regulate what your children read. Michael Norris, a publishing expert who wrote a paper for the Book Publishing Report, claimed that you should allow children to read whatever they want, if you want them to develop a love of books. He writes: 'What we have found is that parents should not worry whether a title looks too young or too old for a child. If a book has caught their attention, then let them take it and make up their own mind. Parents have too much of a role in deciding which books their child is going to read. It is turning children off. They should let them choose.'

Reading 'age appropriate' books doesn't ensure that children will escape trauma from reading. There are parts of Jacqueline Wilson (particularly in The Illustrated Mum) which are still haunting as an adult reader. There are moments of Harry Potter which are really frightening.

Ultimately it seems that experts in child development agree that reading should be an uninhibited, child-led activity. But if your children are going on adventures via books that aren't aimed at their age demographic, it's essential to create a culture of communication between you so that they can discuss anything they've read which has prompted questions or frightened them. Fear is not inherently a bad thing, as long as you can process it with adults who make you feel safe.

As JK Rowling said, 'We need to feel fear, and we need to confront that in an controlled environment... The child that has been protected from the dementors in fiction, I would argue, is much more likely to fall prey to them later in life in reality.'