Who's Afraid of Children's Books?

This essay was written for the print only periodical, THE APPROACH, in Fall of 2025 and has been republished here with their permission.

There’s a phrase book banners use a lot: Parent’s rights. They borrowed it from the anti-masker/anti-vaxxer crowd, and while the venn diagram of those demographics isn’t a perfect circle it’s close. Parents have rights—this is an argument you hear a lot from those who are proponents of book bans. That public institutions must yield their expertise and curation to the whims of said parental rights. And—despite the fact that it elides the erosion of other parent’s rights to allow their kids access to certain books—it’s proven to be an incredibly effective argument. Americans tend to agree that when it comes to a child’s education, parental rights is the trump card. 

With states like Utah and South Carolina banning specific books from the entire state school system in a single go, or Florida and Texas in a race to make classrooms as free of books as possible—or even California creating an infrastructure of gag orders around Palestinian curriculum with the hastily assembled and passed AB 715—it’s fair to wonder how we got to the place of such rampant censorship. The shortest answer is that dark money interests that are opposed to public education writ large, or that disagree with the separation of church and state, have used book bans around content that touches on culture war flashpoints (transgender people, for example, or frank recountings of American history) as a means to impose a Christo-fascist agenda, and defund public institutions of learning altogether. 

This is a correct answer, but it’s not a complete one. Central to all school book bans is the question of what is appropriate for children, and who gets to decide. Even  children’s publishing professionals contend with this question, one that is deeply subject to rapidly evolving social mores. On the one hand, representation of diversity has exploded in the last decade, an uncomplicated improvement for literacy in general. A major study by First Book Research and Initiatives revealed that children with access to diverse books spend more time reading, and have higher literacy scores—with a three point improvement on the national average. That states like Florida which leads the nation in book bans, also rank lowest in reading scores (Florida is 44th in the country) is not exactly a plot twist. 

On the other hand, we have also seen a downturn in major publishing houses taking on books that model anything other than good behavior in their protagonists, particularly in picture books. Main characters these days typically will do the right thing in the end. They will learn a lesson. They will change, and for the better. This is a tried and true story structure, and I do not mean to argue that it need be abandoned. Morality is taught. But a lack of new books with diverse perspectives–books allowed to be weird or dark or that decline to be morally instructive– is, I think, a mistake on several levels. 

This publishing framework does not allow these newly accepted diverse authors the chance to truly unfurl as artists, relegating us to didactic or historic texts about our marginalization, or our cuisine, or our holidays. These books are important and should exist, and also they are not the only stories were are capable of telling. It is a limiting model, and will also necessarily limit the joy the children who encounter these books will derive from them, and the joy the creators will take in making them. It ensures that our place on the shelf and in the annals of literary accomplishment will be restricted. It will also unwittingly send the message that to deserve space on the page, children of diverse backgrounds need to be obedient, reinforcing existing social demands- like those on Black children especially, to essentially not be children. 

It is worth noting that some creators are allowed this freedom, and they use it to incredible effect. Jon Klassen comes to mind; his recent early reader, The Skull, is the exact kind of book for which I am advocating. It is dark and weird and a little scary; Otilla is a brave protagonist but not one defined by her morality. It is also worth noting that the creators allowed this freedom tend to be, by no fault of their own, cisgender, heterosexual, white guys, who are allowed all manner of freedoms of speech that the rest of us are not.

Denying this freedom of expression to most creators also reduces the role of children’s literature to simply be morally instructive, or as a means to instill obedience. And this is where I believe that we as an industry—and parents inadvertently—play directly into the hands of book banners. 

If children’s literature is not written to instill the love of art by exposure to complexity, nuance, questions that do not yield easy answers, and to liberate the mind, then we relegate ourselves to forever fighting to justify the point of each individual book on the ever-shifting ground of what is morally acceptable. This footing is precarious at best; to a right-leaning Evangelical parent, the inclusion of a single gay character in a story may destroy the work’s moral footing altogether. To a white nationalist, a book like my own Love in the Library (illustrated by Yas Imamura), which tells the true story of how my grandparents met in a Japanese American incarceration camp during World War II is categorically inappropriate because it ends with an author’s note about America’s history of state-sanctioned racism. These are impossible arguments to win when there is a fundamental disagreement on the terms of morality.

When we as parents or creators or industry professionals cede the argument that literature’s function is to reinforce a singular worldview, when we are discomfited by characters who do the wrong thing—Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak was famously banned for years for modeling poor behavior from a child; Max does not learn a lesson, he simply feels his feelings and moves on—or we are afraid of the darkness that lurks in pages, as in William Steig’s brilliant and upsetting The Amazing Bone, we find ourselves struggling to win a fight we’ve already surrendered. I don’t believe either of those books would be published today.

As a parent, I understand the inclination to inundate my children with positive role models. I would like them to be good. I would like them to be kind. I would like them to be obedient to me because that is what would be most convenient. Put on your shoes, for god’s sake. But that is not their job. Their job is to learn, often the hard way, and to tell me who they are. To ask questions only they can answer for themselves, and to struggle with complexity. It is not my job, as much as I would sometimes like it to be, to dictate how they think. That is something they have the opportunity to hone through life experience, and also, critically, through literature. 

I have heard it said that the first authoritarian our children will learn to overthrow are their parents. While the Right often uses a language of violence that unwittingly reveals a history of child abuse in their own lives—for example, Tucker Carlson promising an October 2024 Trump presidential campaign rally that when elected the candidate would give the country a “spanking” to riotous applause—even those on the Left struggle to think of their children as people, rather than as extensions of their parents. Often, the book ban argument devolves into “parent’s rights” on both sides, ignoring the existence of children’s rights. 

As the president of Authors Against Book Bans, a group of over five thousand book creators across the country united by this single issue, I have had countless meetings with other people fighting bans in this space, and have been told time and time again that children’s rights do not poll well. That it is a losing argument for this battle. It does not sway moderates, and even those who agree do not find that angle compelling. 

This to me reveals the fundamental sick at the heart of book bans– which is that both sides of this fight tend to agree that the role of children’s literature is to create and instill obedience, or not to exist at all. 

So, if you parents want to instill freedom of thought and expression in your child, read a weird or upsetting or advanced book with them. Don’t tell them how to feel about it. Let them tell you what they think, and don’t correct their interpretation. Remember that their mind is theirs to build, and there is no safer way to start testing the limits of their imagination than through literature. You have a responsibility to model tolerance through your actions, and that includes how you govern their media intake. 

Because if you want your kid to grow up into the kind of adult who doesn’t ban books? Then they can’t be scared of them. And neither can you.