Katherine Rundell says it's a mistake for adults to discard children's literature

Katherine Rundell passionately argues for the importance and depth of children’s literature, challenging the common misconception that such books are merely frivolous or escapist.

Adults Dismiss Children's Books As Frivolous, Ignoring Literary Merit

Many adults tend to dismiss children’s books, failing to recognize their literary merit. Rundell insists that the greatest children’s books, at their finest, offer a way for readers to access what is "most sharp and clear within us." These books are not just simple stories—they become tools for searching out large ideas, questions, and answers. Rundell encapsulates this spirit as “findism” rather than escapism: children’s literature is about seeking, discovering, and grappling with life’s biggest themes.

Children’s books speak across generations about power, endurance, fear, faith, care, love, doubt, and passion. Rundell points to classics like "Northern Lights," Ursula K. Le Guin’s "Earthsea," "Pippi Longstocking," "Paddington Bear," and "Stuart Little" as examples where these themes emerge profoundly. Adults who read children’s books find themselves accessing their sharpest and clearest selves, stripped of adult compromises and affectations. Rundell asserts that in these stories one can “find the very meat of the human heart.”

Children's Literature Offers Unique Benefits For Adult Well-Being Unattainable in Adult Fiction

Rundell explains that children’s literature offers specific benefits for adults that adult fiction often cannot. These books celebrate joy and hope in a direct, unashamed way. The best children’s fiction does not ignore darkness or hardship; it acknowledges that “the world burns, it is on fire and there will be more to come,” but insists it is always worth teaching children and adults how to rejoice. The joy found in these books “explodes” from their pages—it is “a kind of stick of dynamite.”

Returning to children’s books as an adult serves as a reminder that imagination is vital, not optional. Rundell contends that imagination is indispensable not only to personal happiness, but also to political change, to love—since to imagine is to enter another person’s inner world—and to the building of civilizations themselves. Reading children’s books reignites daily wonder and serves as “a kind of defibrillator for the imagination.” These stories can revive a s ...

Children’s literature has undergone a remarkable transformation over centuries, moving from moral instruction and behavioral control toward embracing the authentic nature and imagination of children.

Children's Literature Was for Behavioral Control and Moral Instruction, Not Entertainment

Medieval and Early Modern Children's Books Emphasized Rules on Behavior

Katherine Rundell highlights that the earliest children's books, dating back to the Middle Ages, were chiefly concerned with controlling children's behavior. These texts focused on instructing children not to engage in frowned-upon habits, such as spitting on the ground or picking their noses. This theme of behavioral regulation persisted for hundreds of years.

18th-19th Century Children's Literature: Morality via Instruction and Discipline

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the purpose of children's literature shifted further towards shaping the morality of children. Rundell explains that these books were not intended to delight or entertain children. Instead, their chief purpose was to provide constant instruction and discipline, aiming to mold children’s moral character and maintain control over them, rather than to captivate their imaginations.

Golden Age Honored Children's Authentic Nature and Experiences

Pioneering Writers Focused On the Child's Heart Over Adult Anxieties

With the onset of the “golden age” of children’s literature, pioneering writers such as Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, J.M. Barrie, and E. Nesbitt began to look directly at the reality of what a child is. Rather than addressing adult anxieties, these authors explored and honored the true nature of the child’s heart. For instance, Alice from “Alice in Wonderland” is depicted as a difficult girl who doesn’t obey the rules, showcasing children as they are rather than as adults wish them to be.

Children's Fiction Flourishes Independently From Institutions

This golden age marked a turning point: children’s fiction was unhooked from its previous attachments to the schoolroom and the pulpit. Rundell notes that the genre became liberated, flourishing independently from the instituti ...

Children's Literature Explores Themes of Power, Endurance, Fear, Faith, and Love

Katherine Rundell explains that children's literature addresses immense themes such as power, endurance, fear, faith, care, love, doubt, and passion. She offers examples from a wide range of works to illustrate how children's books engage with the spectrum of human experience: Philip Pullman's "Northern Lights," Ursula Le Guin's "Earthsea," Astrid Lindgren’s "Pippi Longstocking," "Paddington Bear," and "Stuart Little." In these stories, deep emotional currents and existential questions appear, presented in ways that are accessible to young readers but resonant for all ages. Rundell emphasizes that children’s fiction reaches the very essence—"the meat of the human heart"—by stripping away the adult complications and poses, revealing enduring truths that speak universally.

Children's Books Convey Hard Truths While Maintaining Hope and Joy

Rundell asserts that the greatest children's books acknowledge the existence of darkness, fear, and difficult truths in the world, but balance these with lessons of hope and love. The genre does ...

Katherine Rundell creates fantasy that appeals to both children and adults by blending adventure, emotional nuance, and a deep respect for her readers’ intelligence.

Rundell Writes For Three: Her Childhood Self, Her Adult Self, and Children Today

Rundell explains that she writes for three audiences at once. First, she writes for her twelve-year-old self, which means her books are filled with big adventures, peril, vivid descriptions of food, and humor that would have delighted her as a child. She blends this youthful longing for excitement and delight with her adult desires as a writer: to include reality—not necessarily in plot, but reality in the sense of emotional and psychological truth. She strives to reveal not the sanitized world, but the deeper layers of human nature, including aggression and the darkness that each person carries.

In addition, Rundell is acutely aware of writing for children living in the world today, not children from decades past. She refuses to write stories based on outdated assumptions about what kids can handle or understand. Rundell actively salutes children's cleverness and the depth of what they deserve from literature.

The Never Fear Uses a Shipwreck Metaphor to Explore Adult Resilience

The Never Fear, the third book in Rundell’s Impossible Creatures series, is named after the ship navigated by Christopher and his best friend and co-hero, Anya Argan. The ship undergoes breaking and rebuilding, serving as a metaphor for the process of surviving and recovering from life’s inevitable struggles. Rundell crafts the ship as a symbol of hope at the moment of failure and despair, representing the idea that everyone will experience being shipwrecked by adulthood, but it is always possible to rebuild with renewed skill, resilience, and flair.

Christopher and Anya are thrust into Herculean tasks—challenges that directly reference the trials of Hercules. They experience failure so profound that it threatens to consume them with despair and the potential permanent loss of loved ones. ...