Do you even know any children!?
The words that crushed me as a writer and are now my mantra as a school librarian
For your weekly letter, I’m trying something different and sharing a personal story that formed me as a kidlit reader and drives me in my work today. This type of essay is usually only for paid subscribers, but I'm sharing it as a free post for all today because I want to invite as many grown-ups into this intellectual journey as possible.
Before I became a school librarian, I was a second-grade teacher who wrote kidlit on the side. (No, I haven’t published anything yet!) I’m still interested in writing kidlit, but that’s not the purpose of today’s letter.
Instead, I’m sharing words I received in a writing critique in 2018. These words knocked me out at the time, but they spur me on today and even haunt me (in a good way).
Through a local writing organization, I participated in something called the Great Critique. It was a chance for aspiring writers to share a manuscript with a published author and receive feedback. We sat in a circle and took turns reading our stories aloud to the group before the presiding author verbally deconstructed them.
My manuscript was ready.
I was ready.
Time to slay the dragon of reading my story aloud to strangers and pursue my publishing dreams.
Maybe the author would love it.
Maybe she’d love it so much that she’d offer to pass it on to her agent.
Maybe they’d sign me.
Maybe, maybe, maybe…
When I finished reading, there was a pause.
The author, neutral expression, leaned forward and asked, “I wonder. It’s just…”
Pause.
“Do you even know any children?”
My stomach dropped. I was shocked. And mad.
Did I know any children?
As a mother of 3 under 5 (at the time) and a second-grade teacher, of course I knew children. I was drowning in them!
She was concerned that my manuscript was too dark, too much, for her sensibility of what children wanted. Of course, she was right about the manuscript. And she was right in another way, too: although I was a grown-up in charge of children who knew them in a great many ways, I was failing to know and respect them as the first and ultimate audience of kidlit. Though I read to them multiple times per day, I failed to step back and observe what most delighted them on the page. I was studying kidlit in its own context instead of in the context of its true readers: children.
I have never forgotten her question. In fact, today, it lives rent-free in my mind as a clarion call for filtering out the kidlit that kids like compared with the kidlit grown-ups want kids to like.
Most picture books being published today fit the objectives and tastes of the grown-ups who make and buy them—not the wants or needs of independent kid readers.
I want to grab agents and publishers by the shoulders, shake them, and ask, “Do you even know any children?” Do you know what delights them? Elates them? Makes them gasp or giggle?
In my work as an elementary librarian who reads aloud to over 500 children per week, clocking over 1,000 read-alouds per year, I’ve undergone a renovation of the readerly soul: I now believe that kid’s books should be first and foremost for kids. This sensibility drives the books I choose to purchase for my library and the books I choose to read aloud. It drives the books I choose to review and recommend and the public discourse I aspire to participate in.
In a world where kids' books are being made mostly for the sensibilities of grown-ups, I wonder: how might we put the kids back in kids’ books? How might we shift the sensibilities of publishers and adult consumers to hold the curiosity and delight of kid readers as more important than the didactic agenda of the grown-ups in charge of them?
I hope to explore these questions with you further in the coming months.
What do kids want? What do they most enjoy? How do we know? Or define it? What does it mean for a kids’ book to “work?” Are we promoting books that meet this bar or platforming faux kidlit — the kind that’s for the grown-ups, not the kids? How are books rising to the occasion of satisfying their true readers or missing the mark?
Happy pondering and happy reading,
Chrissie
I love this so much. Some of the most beautiful children's books I've read are 100% only going to be loved by adults who buy them. Very few authors draw both kids and adults in. Kate Dicamilo and her Marcy Watson series is probably our family's #1 pick. All three of our kids have loved them since they were 2-3 years old and still love them to this day, as do my husband and I. They manage to be simple while having so much substance to them but also so silly that you can't help but laugh. They just make us all smile.
Spot on!