With kids as young as 5 hooked on Harry Potter, parents struggle with older, darker themes

The trouble with Harry: He’s nearly all grown up

It’s a little-kid rite of passage: lugging Harry Potter to and fro, begging for toy wands and Hogwarts birthday parties. But the boy wizard is nearly grown, and the love of magic he inspires in the very young is now tinged with pure evil, dripping with teen hormones.

Parents revel in their kindergartners and first-graders taking on the big books, their rousing playground games of Quidditch on improvised brooms and trick-or-treating with big round glasses and greasepaint thunderbolt scars.

Enthusiastic young readers and healthy imaginations? Of course, but potentially frightening images deep into the book and movie franchise, including the latest movie blockbuster “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” have parents trying to decide when — if ever — to pull the plug.

How young is too young now that bite-sized fans can’t mature with Harry as his first wave of admirers did, dressed as their favorite characters as they waited giddily outside bookstores and movie theaters year after year for J.K. Rowling and Hollywood to dole out Potter along a growing-up timeline they all shared?

Today, the life-and-death saga is out there in full — in libraries and bookstores, on DVD and in the homes of friends, with the last book released in a frenzy in 2007. And the story is there in the love of many parents, too, including some who note that movie No. 6 was released last week with a PG rating, unlike the previous two marked PG-13.

“As a librarian, the issue of young children and Harry Potter is a constant concern,” said Paula Laurita in Athens, Ala. “Rowling intended for the first book to be for children 9 and 10 years old. Naturally, as Harry aged so did the plots. In reality, books six and seven are young adult literature, not juvenile literature.”

Valerie Christensen in Salt Lake City learned that one the hard way. Her 9-year-old son had been plowing through the books, trying to finish the sixth before joining his parents and 8-year-old sister for the movie that opened July 15.

Plowing, that is, until three days before the big day — tickets purchased in advance.

“He comes into the kitchen all upset and started packing away all his Harry Potter books for the giveaway pile. He was 25 pages from the end and had become so upset by ‘the violence and scary stuff’ that he wouldn’t finish it,” Christensen said. “He told his dad to give away his ticket. I’m generally more vigilant about this stuff, but the ‘Everybody’s doing it, it must be OK’ encroached, even though I really questioned the content for young kids.”

The scary stuff includes Ralph Fiennes as a creepy, sunken-eyed Dark Lord Voldemort with a flat nose and snakelike nostrils, his Death Eater apparitions on hand to help their evil master destroy teen Harry, conquer the wizarding world and bend non-magical Muggles to his will. War is definitely on, and there’s an epic lake scene that book fans know well.

There’s also some kissy face as Half-Blood leads to a sexier and violent film finale based on the seventh and final book that will be split into two movies planned over the next two years.

By then, Harry and his fellow wizards-in-training will have grown from 10ish to nearly 20.

While some young kid fans self-regulate on scary Harry, some parents have stepped in mid-series on the books and doled out Potter movies on DVD to help minimize the impact.

Canadian Sue Carkner in Ottawa, Ontario, loves that her 9-year-old daughter is a longtime fan, venturing into Potterland when she was in kindergarten, soon begging for book two.

“After a few chapters of the second book we realized she was having nightmares and stopped. We wouldn’t let her see the movies at that point. We had to wait about six months for her sophistication level to catch up to her reading level,” Carkner said.

The new movie was possible now that Catherine has completed the book series — twice — and enjoyed full-on Harry in a theater — once — without incident when the last movie came out two years ago. She had to cover her eyes a couple of times during “Half-Blood” but ended up enjoying herself, her mom reports.

Cindy Chapman’s 9-year-old daughter won’t be getting the chance to move on to “Half-Blood.” Chapman, in Minneapolis, let her read the first two books and see the companion movies, but that’s it.

How did mom explain herself?

“The way I handled it was that I told her that Harry and the entire crew have grown up quite fast and are doing things that she isn’t yet allowed to do, so how could I allow her to read and/or watch those movies yet? They are teenagers and she is just 9!”

Emme Ackerman, 19, was in second grade when she first picked up Harry back in 1997, the year the franchise hit the culture like a lightning bolt.

“We’d go through the books in four days max,” said the soon-to-be college freshman. “I remember my second-grade teacher said nobody could write a book report on Harry Potter because everyone wanted to.”

Ackerman said she felt lucky to “have these huge books to read,” and had a good time crushing on Daniel Radcliffe after seeing the first movie in 2001.

It took some doing, but she found her old Hogwarts gown to wear when she and a dozen friends trooped off to see “Half-Blood,” excited as their younger selves to soak up a favorite fantasy world that’s been around as long as they have.

“I had to search my entire apartment for that gown,” Ackerman said of the chintzy black robe adorned with a Gryffindor badge. “It took hours, but I found it.”

Amanda Boyle, another 19-year-old and a Johns Hopkins University junior, laughs when she watches early Harry and remembers the excitement of waiting for each new book and movie.

“It’s like, oh my God, they look so young, but we were young, too,” she said. “We didn’t grasp the enormity of the rest of our lives, just as Harry didn’t.”