In December I met a fellow bibliophile for coffee. As often happens when two people who love books linger over a second cup, the conversation drifted easily between parenting, the peculiarities of adult life, and the quiet consolations of reading. Before long we found ourselves circling a question neither of us could quite dismiss: what has happened to children’s literature and when did adults begin occupying so much of its space?
The question was not born of nostalgia alone. Rather, it emerged from a growing sense that something subtle has shifted in the way many contemporary books for children are conceived. Increasingly one hears authors, and paretnts alike, describe these work as the story they “wished they had as a child.” On the surface this sounds generous, even admirable. Yet the phrase contains an assumption worth examining.
When adults write the stories they wish they had read as children, they may unknowingly shift the centre of the story away from the child and toward the adult memory of childhood.
Much of the children’s literature that has endured did not seem to arise from this impulse. Writers such as A. A. Milne, E. B. White, and Roald Dahl appeared less concerned with correcting their own childhood reading experiences than with entering the imaginative world of the child. Their stories were playful, mischievous, occasionally unsettling, and often morally textured without being overtly instructive. Above all, they trusted the child reader as a distinct audience with its own humour, fears and appetite for the strange.
Yet storytelling for children has never belonged solely to printed books. Across much of Africa, long before children encountered stories on a page, they encountered them through voice. Folktales (ditshomo in Sestho) told at dusk, poetry and communal storytelling were woven into everyday life. These narratives did not begin with the adult desire to repair the past. They began with the shared pleasure of narrative itself.
African oratory reveals something important about the pedagogical architecture of storytelling. The storyteller does not lecture. Instead, meaning unfolds through rhythm, repetition, exaggeration and suspense. Children listen, anticipate, interrupt, laugh and participate. The lesson may be present, but it rarely arrives as instruction. The story carries it quietly.
In this sense, traditional storytelling and the best children’s literature share a common structure: both trust narrative itself to cultivate language, imagination and moral understanding.
Yet many contemporary books for children appear to reverse this balance. Increasingly one encounters stories carefully calibrated to satisfy adult expectations: aesthetically pleasing illustrations designed for social media, gently reassuring narratives that avoid discomfort, and themes shaped by adult anxieties about identity, belonging or emotional resilience. None of these concerns are inherently misguided. They often arise from genuine care for children’s wellbeing.
But the cumulative effect can produce something curious. In some cases, the contemporary children’s book risks becoming a space where adults explain the world to children rather than invite them to explore it.
The paradox is subtle but significant. In attempting to serve children more deliberately, we may sometimes end up writing primarily for ourselves.
Childhood, after all, is not experienced retrospectively. Children encounter stories in the immediacy of curiosity, mischief, fear and wonder. They do not approach literature as a site of psychological correction. They approach it as an adventure.
For generations, stories quietly shaped language, empathy and moral imagination. A child absorbed narrative rhythm, vocabulary and ethical complexity not through instruction, but through immersion in story. When narrative becomes too carefully engineered around particular developmental outcomes, the lesson risks overshadowing the experience of the story itself.
To raise this question is not to dismiss contemporary authors or the genuine care with which many approach their craft. Rather, it is to ask whether we have slightly misplaced our centre of gravity. Are we writing literature that trusts children’s imaginations, or narratives that adults recognise as virtuous?
Children have never needed adults to simplify the world for them quite as much as adults imagine. What they have always needed are stories spacious enough to explore it.
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