Shopping for Christmas gifts is always an informative activity, and this year was no different. What my wife and I learned this time around is that the vast majority of children’s books on the shelves are abject nonsense, and that there appears to be no sense amongst writers of children’s books that children have a capacity for anything other than abject nonsense.
An additional trend, working alongside that one, is the uglification of children’s books, that sees simplistic shapes and squiggles substituted in for beautiful illustration. It is fitting, though, and it could even be described as helpful, because it’s a more immediately obvious indication that a book isn’t worth buying than a low-quality story.
This became an unavoidable realisation for us, and simultaneously suitable material for an article, as we scoured children’s bookshelves in multiple shops, looking for books that we’d enjoy reading to our children. Is that too much to ask for? We weren’t looking for literary classics, although we wouldn’t have said no to those, but we were looking for something to provoke more than a resigned sigh of, ‘Ok, this will do,’ as we paid for it.
To distinguish this issue from the broader problem of slop publications, of which adults are treated to no small number, I mainly point to the fact that – in my experience – there are far fewer non-slop options on offer for children in 2026 than there are for adults. It is endemic in children’s publishing, whereas I’m not sure it could be described as such for adults.
As a result of that, whereas adults are more likely to end up with a curated bookshelf at home that is ultimately to their liking, a child’s bookshelf – whether through resignation, gifts from less discerning relatives and friends or simply the process of entropy – ends up brimming with contents not dissimilar to those found at a car boot sale.
That is, the books no one thinks are worth keeping.
As every parent will know, it is difficult to maintain standards 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In your better moments, you hold the line. You’re in the bookshop and you don’t see anything that you feel is worth buying, and so you don’t reward what’s there with your hard-earned money. However, not infrequently, your child latches onto something and insists that they must have it, to hell with your misgivings. You might resist four out of five times, but even that solitary occasion, repeated over the months and years, results in a lot of trash accumulating at home.
And this is the crux of the issue. Children are more than happy to read nonsense, much as a great many adults are. The difference is that the latter are free to choose that for themselves, whereas the former aren’t. The more you offer it to them, though (and more importantly, to their weary parents), the more likely it is to get through and end up colonising their bookshelves.
The Smeds and the Smoos, The Dinosaur that Pooped a Planet, Tractors in Space, Sniff! Sniff! What’s that Whiff? (which seemed to be about a dinosaur following other farting dinosaurs around in an effort to get to the bottom of a bad smell). Just a couple of the names I memorised as I browsed books with increasing desperation. The first of those is by one of the most acclaimed children’s authors of the day, Julia Donaldson, of The Gruffalo fame. All of which is…fine, but it occurred to us that perhaps we ought to expect more from children’s books than fine at best.
The authors and series that dominate the children’s shelves, such as those by Ms Donaldson, the Peppa Pig adventures, those by Tom Fletcher and a whole rake of others seem to have settled into a comfortable production pattern, where each new book just rearranges the silliness and shapes to be found in all of their previous books.
I am not making the stuffy point here that the only things worth reading to children are stories packed with faith and morals. Rather, that tapping into a little bit of timeliness wouldn’t be amiss. Beauty. Meaning. Wisdom. All of those things can be offered to children in entertaining, age-appropriate ways. It doesn’t all have to be scatological humour and adventures in makey-uppy land.
Children do both of those things more humorously and more imaginatively than the adult authors writing for them, anyway.
We were given a beautiful copy of Clemont Clarke-Moore’s ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, illustrated by the wonderfully talented P.J. Lynch, that rewarded reading and re-reading with our son in the days running up to Christmas, just as the Beatrix Potter books we have (Peter Rabbit) are always a joy to sit down to read with him.
Likewise, there is no end to the value of aesthetic reproductions of the age-old fairytales (Canadian iconographer, Jonathan Pageau, is producing some of the most astonishing renditions of the classics – Snow White, Jack and the Giants – that I’ve ever seen).
It is my limited experience that children, insofar as their books are concerned, are very easily pleased. But that doesn’t mean the bar should be dropped, as it appears to have been. They are probably the most important demographic books are written for, as it’s the stories we’re exposed to in childhood that we end up bearing with us the longest in life.