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I am the parent of two daughters who are now young adults.
When they were younger, I never tried to prevent them reading anything they wanted. Thankfully, I never had to; they showed no interest in anything that I thought unsuitable. They have both read the HP books and one of them is an avid Tolkien fan.
While I would not ban any literature, if one of my daughters had read exclusively just one author or genre, HP, LoTR or any other, I would have intervened, not to stop her reading but to encourage her to read more widely.
Children can be influenced by what they read, even though they can tell what is fiction and what is not from a very early age. Absorbing just one person's ideas about any area of life, real or fantasy, is not a good thing.
Those who are worried about what children read are right to be concerned but, instead of banning books and narrowing a child's imagination, they should be helping to widen it.
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