Children on LT?

Hello everyone. Since this seems to be the spot for people who love children's books, I was wondering how many of you who have kids include their books in your own libraries, or do you set up a separate library on LT for them? I have two kids, 5 and 2, and I've been thinking of setting up libraries for them to keep records of what they own, have read and loved, even as they grow out of books. Any thoughts?

I would have loved a parent doing that for me if LT had existed when I was a kid. You see how many of us spend time asking, does anyone remember the name of this book I read when I was seven? Of course, not all children would appreciate it, but I think most would--even if they turned out not to be obsessed with books, most people seem to like the nostalgia of thinking about their favorite picture book or fairy tale.

Just so you are aware, while it is completely fine for you to set up accounts just to catalogue your children's books, children under 13 are prohibited from using LT (even with supervision).

That's good to know (about the under 13 rule). So, would you just set up another account in your own name, or their name without letting them use it? I'll check it out.

that sounds like a good idea... we just boxed up all the baby books, but it would be nice to keep track of their reading tastes through the years, as well as the books I give as gifts (and that I expect to see on my granchildrens' shelves someday...)

It sounds like a good idea to create special children's accounts, where they can't receive or send comments until they turn 13, and possibly even make it a private, invisible account. My crazy little daughter was going through her books a while back and organizing donations, keeps, and sells (what we call them!) and she asked me to do a spreadsheet. I didn't know 6 year olds knew what spreadsheets were!! So, we did the spreadsheet but that was before we found LT. LT would have been incredibly easier. Currently, I keep the entire families books in my LT, but we're only about 1/2 way done.

>5 awriterspen:, Wow, colorbeautiful, your daughter sounds just like me when I was a child! Except of course there was no such thing as a spreadsheet then. :) It is amazing to me how computer-savvy kids are these days.

I've chosen to keep the whole family's library together for now for a couple reasons. I don't know how to say whose book is whose and that changes over time as kids pass things to younger siblings. Secondly, my main reaon for using LT is so that grandparents can easily check what we have and not send duplicates and I don't know if they would bother to check mulitiple libraries.
I think keeping separate libaries of what has actually been read by each kid rather than what they own would be very interesting long term but I don't think I can keep up with that!

i hadn't heard the under 13 rule. I had been thinking about setting up a librarything account for our classroom, and it seems like I remember seeing other elementary classrooms on here. Where can I find the "official" librarything rules??

Terms of Use. As I understand it, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act prohibits LT from letting those under 13 use LT unless LT sets up some protective measures. But, if you want to know more, you should probably talk to someone at LT or check out the 1998 Act.

You could always use the tags to keep track of who's read what or who owns what if you don't want to make multiple libraries...

It's what I've done when I started collecting my parents' books. And I nth the comment on how lovely it would have been to have kept a record of what I read as a child. If only because my memory is mush and I only remember the ones that really, really stood out. I'd love to know how my reading experience differs from that of my friends more specifically than "Oh, yeah, I largely read Dutch children's authors and you lot are all native English speakers, so you didn't."

My son is now 28, but we kept a LOT of his books and those that he left here are cataloged in our account with his name as a tag. He did take some of his books with him which were mostly late teens/early 20's acquisitions. However the two by Shel Silverstein went with him!

A year or so ago, I started to catalog the books I read to my kids when they were young (and still at home). I noticed that even the few that I entered were already skewing the results of book recommendations.

Just recently, moments (really) after my youngest son moved out, we cleaned out his old bedroom (probably the first ~actual~ cleaning in 8 years...) and unpacked the children's books. There's over 200 of them. When I get the time, I'm going to open a new account just for those books. It'll be a Lifetime, public account, but the profile page will refer back to my current one.

Now that we've got a grandchild, I expect that we'll be reading these books again when her parents come to visit.

thanks for including that. Very helpful.

Hi - I have my kids' books on my account and I let them use my account (edited to add - under my supervision!) to include their own mini-reviews on which books they really like and what they think about them - they are only 5 and 7, so everything is still in our family library and their thoughts go in the comments section - they love to see this recorded and I figure it's good practice for getting them into writing reviews later!

However, because of this I made my account private since at this stage I'm not really comfortable with publishing their stuff until they are old enough to participate in decision-making about what they want as public record. I recently received a message from someone whom I had added as an interesting library that I should remove them from my list because my library was private and I wasn't sharing with the rest of the group (I'd have liked to write back to explain, but have no way of contacting them since their comments section was turned off - or they blocked me? I'm not sure how it works - they did have an awesome library though!) - I felt really bad that people feel that way about us private library people - I don't mean to be unsharing! I hope LT does come up with a way to make just part of one's library private some day - in the meantime, I'd be grateful to hear how others work around this problem...

I've currently got two LT accounts, and I administer a third one for my children's and YA bookclub.
Raising_a_reader is all the material I've read/am reading to our 2 year old. Fabfic-terrificteens is YA material, which is another addiction of mine. I've been considering having a third account for me, for all my adult books, but spend heaps of time here already! (But I'll probably succumb in the New Year and start one up just for me.)