Marta realized it almost by chance. While tidying up her 13-year-old son’s room, she found a young adult novel that was very popular among his classmates. She had bought it herself a few weeks earlier, drawn in by the good reviews and the fact that her son had finally started reading again. But as she leafed through it, she discovered scenes and dialogue she hadn’t expected to find in a book intended, in theory, for his age group. «If someone had warned me, I’m not saying I wouldn’t have let him read it, but at least I could have talked to him about it first,» she says.
Stories like Marta's are common in many households. Parents control what TV shows their children watch, check the apps they use, and monitor their diets, but the content of the books they read often falls off their radar. It is precisely to fill that gap that Goalkeeper Parents, a new platform powered by Alexia Publishing.
A database that grows every day
The tool functions as a reference catalog: for each book included, it provides a fact sheet with detailed information on the presence of violence, sexual content, profanity, drug or alcohol use, and ideological content such as references to gender ideology or the occult.
The database already contains 400 titles that are completely up-to-date, but any user can request an analysis of a title that does not yet appear in the catalog by filling out the contact form available on the website.
Analysis Criteria
Rafael Martínez-Echevarría, the initiative’s founder, explains that the project stems from a question that, according to him, people have stopped asking: not whether children read or not, but exactly what they read. In his view, “for a long time, it has been taken for granted that any reading is positive simply because it is reading, and that has led many families to stop paying attention to the specific content of each book.”.
Martínez-Echevarría insists that “the tool is not intended to judge the literary quality of the works or to act as a moral filter that decides what can and cannot be read.” His approach, he says, is different: “Every family has its own way of raising children and its own boundaries, and all the platform does is present concrete, verifiable data so that parents themselves can decide, without anyone else deciding for them.”.
For the project’s founder, freedom of choice depends on having enough information to make that choice. Buying a book without knowing what’s actually in its pages, he argues, is like making a decision blindly. That’s why he sums up the mission of Padres Guardametas as an effort to bring transparency to an area where, until now, there has been virtually none.
A small publishing house with a specific mission
Alexia Editorial describes itself as a growing publishing house whose goal is to support parents in the—not always easy—task of raising their children. The publisher also invites families themselves to participate in expanding the catalog by suggesting titles and sharing their own reviews, with the goal of ensuring that the database continues to grow through user collaboration.
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