Surviving With Little House on the Prairie and Lord of the Flies

Both shows tell the truth about what it means to grow up in an often inhospitable world.

This spring, Mac Barnett, the award-winning children’s author of such contemporary picture-book classics as Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, dug himself a hole. In Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children, his new book-length work of literary criticism about children’s books, he makes a forceful argument for adults to take children seriously as readers. Their sense of taste, their sense of justice, their sense of imagination. Too many children’s books, he suggests, condescend to their readers. The best stories for kids, he argues, don’t preach or preen or strive to impart pat moral lessons but “tell the truth about what it means to be a human in the world.” And, because of this possibility for great art in children’s literature, and because of its intimate importance to the young people who read it, it behooves us to take it seriously as a mode of literature. “If you don’t think children’s books are real books,” he writes, “on some level you don’t think children are real people.

Then, he steps in it. “I have a nagging fear,” he writes, “that children’s literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole.” For Barnett, this means that the preponderance of kidlit is clunkily didactic at best, thinly exploitative at worst. On its own, it’s probably hard to argue with this sentiment—the sheer number of children’s books based on Paw Patrol episodes alone seems to prove the point. But Barnett goes on to facetiously offer a guesstimate that 94.7 percent are duds. Only 5.3 percent of children’s books, then, would be worthy of the children reading them.

The backlash was immediate, especially among authors of color who felt that the books Barnett dismissively described as “didactic” might likely include many titles meant to reach out to children historically underrepresented in children’s literature. Barnett immediately apologized, but the damage was done. A petition circulated, and a movement began to have his position as the Library of Congress national ambassador for young people’s literature revoked. Barnett’s “crud” remarks, many felt, stood to cause real harm in an industry that is still struggling to diversify and that is threatened constantly by state-sponsored book bans. As the writer and publisher Meg Reid pointed out, though, Barnett’s (hyperbolic) assertion reads differently if you think about the sheer volume of children’s literature published every year. If we take Barnett’s unserious analytic seriously, then his claim means that many thousands of children’s books of the vast number published annually are not crud. Pretty good!

Children’s television, I’d argue, is in a similar state. In this streaming environment, there is more space for children’s TV series than ever before. Lots of it is CGI sludge, of course, and nursery school nonsense and cynically concocted consumer training, but, amid all that “crud,” there’s a lot to be grateful for. If I were to make a long list of the best TV series of the past decade or so, a decent number of those series would certainly be children’s TV shows: Netflix’s City of Ghosts, Hilda, and The Baby-Sitters Club; Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe; Disney ’s Gravity Falls and The Owl House; and, of course, Bluey, the formally perfect Australian animated series that........

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