Children’s books should not leave imagination on the shelf

The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim knew what made a good children’s book. “It must stimulate his imagination,” he said in his essay, The Uses of Enchantment, “help him to develop his intellect and clarify his emotions, be attuned to his anxieties and aspirations.”

So what did Bettelheim recommend? Fairy tales, that’s what. Unexpurgated, bloody, gory, preferably by the brothers Grimm. It’s hard to imagine what he would make of contemporary children’s books, though I think I can guess. Geraldine Mccaughrean, who has just won the Clipp Carnegie Medal, used her acceptance speech to lay into the publishing industry for its prescriptive approach to writing for children.

“With a book that’s going to be sold into schools you get a list of things that are unacceptable – no witches, no demons, no alcohol, no death, no religion,” she said. “It really does cut down what you can write about.” I’ll say. That’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe done for, just for starters. And I wouldn’t put money on The Arabian Nights getting published now either – that’s full of djinns.

Publishers, says Mccaughrean, have a downer too on tricky words, especially in younger fiction. If she’s right, this goes a long way to explaining the inanity of an awful lot of children’s books.

I review children’s books, from tinies up to young adult, and I can tell you what was in the latest batch this morning: a story about a gay teenager recovering from his father’s suicide; a picture book about environmental love; a story about girls doing Stem (science, technology, maths and engineering) described as “near future feminism”; and a feminist retelling of Beowulf.

Now, none of these are bad things in themselves – though they wouldn’t have parted me from my pocket money as a child. But what’s evident is that authors are writing to contemporary ideology as much as to their own sense that they must write or burst, as CS Lewis said about writing a book that started with a faun and an umbrella. What you want from a child’s book is an overpowering desire to find out what happens next. That kind of book can be good literature, or it can be the equivalent of a penny dreadful; it doesn’t matter.

And what about not doing religion or alcohol? I can see where that’s coming from: school librarians whose primary objective is to cover the diversity and accessibility problem in schools, not to get children to read something really good.

It may explain why feminist children’s books have taken over the world. But it also explains why so many books I get sent are so dispiriting.

Young adult fiction is the worst: I receive books about being trans, gay, a Siamese twin, dyslexic or with OCD. There is one on the subject of Brexit, about a post-eu Britain where everyone born outside the country is subject to arrest and deportation. Fun! What I don’t get are many that make me read on, compulsively.

It’s not to say that there aren’t some very good children’s authors out there. Philip Pullman is a cracking storyteller; Katherine Rundell is another. The illustrator Jon Klassen is a genius and David Walliams is funny. But they are exceptions.

As Bettelheim said, children’s books answer our most profound needs without our even realising. When we subvert them, we’re depriving children of a refuge, a delight and a way of understanding the world.

READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion