Should Your Picture Book Set Out to Teach?

Image by the wonderful Emma Chichester Clark, from her blog Plumdog

Knowing the key theme (or themes) of your picture book story is crucial when writing for children. Themes are the underlying idea that drives your story, the message or teaching you want to impart. It’s what you want your child reader to come away with when the story ends. But here’s the thing: if you need to spell out what you theme is, then your story has failed!

So, what do I mean by spelling the theme out? Well, if, for example, your theme is valuing friends and your character has to learn this value, then you cannot – you MUST NOT! — tell the reader that she must value her friends. You must, at all costs, avoid a final line like, And so, the moral of the story is that Molly learned to value her friends.

Instead, what you must do is to explore the theme through story. The ideal way to deliver a moral lesson is to have your main character go through something in the plot and emerge on the other side changed, but you must not tell the reader this lesson or moral explicitly. Not in any obvious way.

You want to show the reader, not tell them, that Molly has interactions with supportive friends and finds out — again, through story — that they bring so much value to her life that she comes away changed. You might explore the ups and downs of her day, how she feels, how she speaks, how others speak to her and how each friend is supportive or helpful through scenes that play out. This will get you to your goal of sharing a moral, but without hitting them over the proverbial head.

If you ask a child what they thought of a story when the book’s closed, they will likely tell you what they learned, but the catch is that you, the writer, must allow them to work it out for themselves. Your hand is guiding them of course, but in a seamless way. Books come alive in a child reader’s imagination, so don’t stop them from working out the moral. Trust in them – they are surprisingly sophisticated.

We all remember how it felt being told what to do as a kid, and reading is one of the very few places young people are not taught or preached to, where kids go to be entertained. Grown-ups too, truth be told. Books that are a joy will be the ones children remember, the ones they gleefully ask of the adult they’ve shared the story with, read it again!

Are your themes coming across as morals? See if you can work them in, but without being didactic — your readers will thank you for it.