Please Let Children’s Books Be Weird
By Tia Hinz, M.Ed. M.A
I have a request.
Actually, maybe it’s a plea.
Please let children’s books be weird.
Let them be whimsical. Let them be ridiculous. Let them make absolutely no sense.
Give me talking mushrooms. Give me a pigeon with an unreasonable amount of confidence. Give me ghosts with social anxiety. Give me a cactus who desperately needs a hug. Give me witches with questionable gardening habits. Give me a spider who decides that actually, being a kitten sounds much better. (Yes, these are books!)
Give me stories that make a room full of children yell, “WHAT?!”
Because somewhere along the way, I think we started putting a lot of pressure on children’s books to be useful.
They need to teach emotional regulation.
Teach kindness.
Teach numbers.
Teach letters.
Teach friendship.
Teach children how to share, how to go to school, how to manage anger, how to use the potty, how to process grief, how to understand differences, how to brush their teeth, and probably how to file their taxes.
Okay, maybe not that last one.
But you get my point.
Children’s books are incredible tools for learning. I use them that way all the time.
But sometimes a book can just be weird.
And I think children—and grown-ups—need that more than ever.
Children Are Already Weird
Spend enough time with young children, and you will quickly realize something:
Their brains are delightfully unhinged.
Spend a day in a preschool classroom, and you will hear conversations that make you question whether you heard them correctly. Half the time, the best thing you can do is stay quiet and see where they're going with it.
Recently, a few of my four-year-olds were playing in our kitchen area when I overheard this:
Child 1: “What are you making for the funeral?”
Child 2: “I’m bring my boyfriend.”
Child 1: “It’s your husband’s funeral.”
Child 2: “Yes, I met my boyfriend at the funeral.”
Child 3: “I made chocolate salad with carrots.”
Child 1: “Can I help you make it?”
Child 2: “Me too?”
And just like that, we went from a husband's funeral and a suspiciously timed new boyfriend to chocolate carrot salad.
Nobody questioned it.
Nobody stopped to point out that the story had taken a completely different turn.
They kept playing.
And somehow, all of those things belonged in the same story.
That's one of my favorite things about young children: they haven't fully learned all the rules we've created about what is supposed to make sense.
A cardboard box isn't necessarily a box.
It's a rocket.
Until it's a bakery.
Then it's a cave.
And five minutes later, three children are arguing because it's obviously a submarine and apparently everyone else should have known that.
Children live remarkably close to imagination. The line between what is and what could be is still wonderfully blurry.
Then we grow up.
We learn what's realistic. What's practical. What's productive. What's appropriate. What's possible.
We learn that certain things are silly. That some ideas don't make sense. That we're supposed to explain ourselves.
And somewhere along the way, many of us become a little afraid of being weird.
Children's literature has the chance to protect that weirdness for just a little longer.
And maybe, if we're lucky, remind the grown-ups reading alongside them that we don't have to lose ours either.
Not Everything Needs a Learning Objective
This might be mildly rebellious coming from an educator, but:
Not every book needs a learning objective.
I love books that help children understand emotions, identity, history, science, community, and the world around them.
Those books matter enormously.
But if every story we give children has to accomplish something measurable, we risk turning reading into another assignment.
Sometimes the purpose of a book is for everyone to laugh.
Sometimes the purpose is for a child to stare at an illustration for five minutes, looking for tiny details.
Sometimes the purpose is that we finished the story and immediately heard:
“READ IT AGAIN!”
Sometimes there doesn't need to be a purpose at all.
We don't demand that every song teach us something.
We don't look at every painting and ask what academic standard it addresses.
Why should all children's stories have to justify their existence through what they teach?
Wonder has value all by itself.
Weird Books Give Writers Permission
This matters for writers, too.
Especially people who want to write for children.
There can be this pressure to start with:
What lesson am I trying to teach?
But what if we started with:
What would be fun?
What would make a kid laugh?
What strange little character has been living in your brain?
What completely ridiculous world would you have wanted to visit when you were seven?
What story makes you excited to write?
Children's authors should be allowed to play.
Actually, I think they need to.
Some of the stories we remember most aren't the ones that carefully delivered their message. They're the ones that created a world we desperately wanted to crawl inside.
Writing for children shouldn't mean squeezing an adult lesson into smaller words and adding illustrations.
Children deserve art created for their delight.
Writers deserve the freedom to create it.
Write the weird book.
Please.
Some tiny human somewhere probably needs exactly your particular flavor of strange.
Weird Books Are Good for Teachers, Too
Teachers spend a lot of time being intentional.
What are the objectives?
What skills are we supporting?
What questions should we ask?
What vocabulary can we introduce?
What extension activity could we do?
I understand why. I do it too.
But sometimes I think we need to put the sticky notes down.
Read the book.
Do the voices.
Be dramatic.
Let the children interrupt because they noticed something completely unrelated in the illustration.
Let the conversation wander somewhere you hadn't planned.
Laugh.
Be surprised.
Let storytime belong to the story.
Some of my favorite moments with children have happened when a book took us somewhere I absolutely did not expect.
That's part of teaching, too.
Children don't only need adults who can instruct them.
They need adults willing to wonder with them.
Parents Need Whimsy, Too
And then there are the grown-ups reading these books at home.
You deserve weird books.
Seriously.
If you're going to be asked to read the same story approximately 847 times, you should at least get something out of the arrangement.
Give parents books with jokes they actually enjoy.
Give them illustrations they'll notice something new in on the twentieth reading.
Give them stories bizarre enough that they find themselves doing increasingly elaborate character voices.
Give them books they don't secretly hide behind the couch because they cannot physically survive another reading.
A good children's book doesn't have to talk exclusively to children.
It can wink at the grown-up holding it.
It can remind us what imagination felt like before everything needed to make sense.
Maybe adults need children's literature for exactly that reason.
Whimsy Isn't Frivolous
I think sometimes we treat whimsy like decoration.
It's cute.
It's silly.
It's extra.
The serious stuff is what matters.
But I don't believe that.
Imagination is how we practice creating things that don't exist yet.
Before you can build something different, you have to be able to imagine that different is possible.
Children do this naturally.
A stick becomes a wand.
A blanket becomes a castle.
The moon follows the car home.
Animals talk.
Monsters can be lonely.
Ghosts can be shy.
Flowers can have secrets.
The impossible is allowed to exist without explanation.
That's creativity.
That's storytelling.
That's play.
And those things don't suddenly become worthless when we grow up.
If anything, I think adults desperately need permission to return to them.
The World Is Serious Enough
Children are growing up in a complicated world.
There are things they need help understanding. There are difficult conversations we absolutely should not avoid. Children's literature can help us talk about grief, injustice, identity, fear, disability, racism, climate change, families, conflict, and belonging.
But children shouldn't only inherit our seriousness.
They should inherit our wonder, too.
They deserve books about important things.
And they deserve books about completely unimportant things.
Strange books.
Loud books.
Books that are quiet and dreamy.
Spooky books without being scary.
Books where nothing behaves the way it should.
Books that exist because somebody somewhere thought:
"You know what would be hilarious?"
We need stories that help children understand the world.
But we also need stories that let them escape it for a while.
Maybe Grown-Ups Should Get a Little Weirder
Perhaps that's why I love children's literature as much as I do.
Children's books permit adults to enter worlds we stopped allowing ourselves to visit.
For a few minutes, nobody asks whether something is practical.
Nobody asks whether the moon can actually talk.
Nobody needs a five-year strategic plan for the dragon.
You turn the page.
As educators, parents, writers, librarians, illustrators, and readers, maybe part of our job isn't always to bring children closer to the adult world.
Maybe sometimes our job is to meet them in theirs.
To sit on the floor.
Open the book.
Accept without question that the bear owns a bakery.
And see what happens next.
Because the world has plenty of seriousness.
It has plenty of rules.
It has plenty of people telling us what is and isn't possible.
What we could use a little more of is whimsy.
So please.
Write the strange story.
Buy the ridiculous book.
Read it with an unnecessarily dramatic voice.
Let children laugh at something that teaches them absolutely nothing.
Let adults laugh too.
Please let children's books be weird.
The rest of us could stand to get a little weirder with them.
