The Long, Glorious Tradition of Calling Children's Books "Crud"

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Spend enough time in the kid lit world, and you realize that children’s literature is a four-hundred-year argument about whether adults should be allowed to ruin it.

The adults usually win. But every so often, an editor comes along who pushes back.

Sometime in the 1940s, the executives at Harper & Brothers took legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom out to lunch with great ceremony. Her bosses believed she was finally ready to graduate from children’s books to adult literature. Children’s books, after all, were considered nursery wallpaper for sticky little people. Surely a successful editor would eventually want to move up to serious books for serious adults.

Nordstrom nearly flipped the lunch table.

She informed the executives that adult books were for ‘dead dull finished adults’ and hurried back to her office to publish what she called ‘good books for bad children.’

This was not the statement of a woman who believed all children’s literature was precious. Quite the opposite. Nordstrom spent decades wading through mountains of forgettable manuscripts while privately raging about ‘mediocre ladies in influential positions’ producing books that failed to give children ‘one slight inkling of beauty and reality.’ She thought most children’s books were dreadful. She said so in letters that are now considered scripture.

She was not alone. For centuries, serious writers and editors in children’s literature have fumed that most children’s books kinda suck.

The tradition begins almost as soon as children’s literature itself does. In 1693, John Locke complained that books written for children were stuffed with “useless trumpery” that filled their heads with nonsense and vice. Locke is generally remembered as a serious thinker, which makes it inconvenient that he was also one of the first English-language critics to suggest that children’s literature was about as satisfying as boiled tripe.

In 1802, Charles Lamb complained to Coleridge about the moralizing educational books crowding out fairy tales: “Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with Tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography and Natural History!”

Mark Twain frequently mocked the watered-down moralism of children’s literature and educational writing, preferring stories with mischief, danger, emotional truth, and humor.

Dorothy Parker — an editor who built a career on eviscerating mediocrity — condemned A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner as “Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.” A book beloved by children made her vomit.

Maurice Sendak saw the trap. He told The Believer in 2012: “I refuse to lie to children. I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”

This was a tradition. An old one. A cherished one, because every serious art form requires its honest critics, and the honest critics of children’s literature have, historically, been other children’s writers and editors, telling it like it is.

Then Mac Barnett did it, and the children’s book world nearly lost its collective minds. And I am still trying to wrap my head around why.

“A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” 
— Mark Twain

In May 2026, the current National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Mac Barnett, published an essay collection called Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children. In one essay, he wrote that “maybe 94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud.”

The number is the punchline. It’s a riff on Theodore Sturgeon’s famous observation that “ninety percent of everything is crud.” Barnett added decimal points for the joke.

Within days, an open letter circulated, addressed to the Library of Congress and Every Child a Reader. It asked them to “publicly and immediately address the harm caused by this statement and work to minimize the damage already done.” Then 250 of the industry’s most successful children’s authors and illustrators signed it.

The main argument was that Barnett’s “crud” argument would hand ammunition to book banners.

The signatories wrote:

“For Black and brown authors, for queer and trans authors, we have seen that very word used as a cudgel and dog whistle to decry the necessary diversification of children’s literature.”

Dog whistle to whom? So a literary criticism of children’s books being too didactic — an argument that has been made for the last two hundred years — is now a coded racial attack at the exact moment a successful author used it in an essay? Please.

The debate didn’t change. The willingness to charitably interpret it did.

I will confess that I have skin in this game. I write diversity books. My books have been quietly pulled from shelves. The censorship machine that the signatories say they’re fighting? I am on the backlisted end of it. And from where I am standing, demanding a beloved author be punished over a hyperbolic sentence in an essay collection isn’t fighting that machine. It’s feeding it.

Still, for an entire week, my social media feed was inundated with children’s book authors calling for Barnett to be canceled. I didn’t see a single post defending him. Not one.

So I asked the kid-lit world a simple question: What will canceling Mac Barnett accomplish?

The right certainly wasn’t going to weaponize Barnett’s literary opinion against book bans. Moms for Liberty doesn’t care about meritocracy. They care about “pornographic,” “age-inappropriate,” “indoctrinating,” “sexualizing” — the standard banning vocabulary. Barnett’s joke was useless to them.

What the right would weaponize was the pile-on itself. The cancel-culture-eats-its-own narrative is the most useful soft-power weapon they have. Every pile-on the left manufactures, the right uses to argue we are unserious. Every pile-on erodes public sympathy for the fights that actually matter.

I posted that warning. I got tarred and feathered. I was called a racist and a “pick me girl.” I was lectured by people whose main counterargument was a personal attack on my credentials.

Twenty-four hours later, the Wall Street Journal opinion page published Meghan Cox Gurdon’s piece. “Mac Barnett, Come on Down. You’re the next contestant on ‘Cancel the Straight White Male.’”

Well, that was predictable.

Ms. Gurdon escoriated kid-lit but made some valid points. Instead of staging another morality play about whether a popular white male author was elitist, we should be having a more interesting conversation about who the books are actually for — kids or adults.

Adults overwhelmingly decide what counts as “good” children’s literature, and the framework adults use has very little to do with what kids actually want.

Adults ask: Does this book teach the right values? Will it build empathy? And is the woodland protagonist modeling healthy conflict resolution?

Kids ask: Would I rather keep reading this or go outside and watch a feral raccoon fight a pizza box in the parking lot?

And honestly? We need both. Books should challenge children, expand empathy, and expose them to new ideas. But they also need to be books kids will voluntarily inhale under blankets with flashlights instead of abandoning after page 12.

Barnett opened that conversation and got pitchforks.

Now, to be clear, Mr. Barnett is National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He is not “Ambassador for Children’s Book Authors” or “Ambassador for the Publishing Industry.” His job is to promote reading. Despite all the complaints about his book disparaging children’s book authors, his job is not to be an author cheerleader.

Still, I get what turns rational folks into cancel culture warriors. Lately, the layoffs in children’s book publishing have been a blood bath. The authors calling for Barnett’s head were defending a vulnerable ecosystem amid political attack and economic precarity. In their minds, Barnett’s comment felt like someone with clout publicly reinforcing narratives that already devalue children’s literature and the people working in it. I get that emotions are raw.

However, there’s something deeply hypocritical about a professional culture where authors routinely proclaim empathy, kindness, and community, and yet they are willing to publicly flog a colleague over a flippant remark that falls squarely within a longstanding literary tradition.

Especially because many of the same people probably privately agree that enormous quantities of books are polished turds. Most editors certainly do. They reject manuscripts all day long for a reason.

But it was the bullying that really struck a nerve. The children’s book industry is very, very insular. We all know each other on a level of intimacy that gets incestuous. We go to the same small conferences, hang out on the same boards, and have the same friend groups.

Now imagine 250 signatories having to break bread with Mr. Barnett at future conferences. “Hey, Mac, come sit at our table. Just forget the fact that we tried to end your career.”

Awkward.

Listen, I am sure Mr. Barnett will do just fine, even if he is asked to resign. His books are clever and unique. And book buyers don’t particularly care if you are walking around with 250 knives in your back. But it is exactly this kind of gross zero-sum game that makes me feel the kid-lit world will cut a bitch if you make one wrong move.

Let me help them sharpen their knives….

This was never about book bans. It’s about egotism. And all the people calling for Barnett’s head are just digging their graves straight into Freud’s.

There. I said it. Set the kiddy trolls loose on me.

No, this is about a scarcity mindset, about people cutting a successful author down because they don’t feel the pie is big enough.

Because if every poorly phrased, sarcastic, elitist, or hyperbolic literary remark becomes grounds for organized professional condemnation, you don’t end up with a healthier literary culture. You end up with a flatter, more performative one where public speech becomes increasingly censored.

That is the part worth pausing on. Because what happened in the kid-lit world is a microcosm for why free speech proponents are losing. Sure, the cancel culture warriors will tell you they are protecting marginalized authors.

I don’t buy it. Just look at the scoreboard.

In the last decade, the left has lost the presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court, most state legislatures, most school boards, the cultural commanding heights of every social media platform, and the public conversation about gender, immigration, and crime. Book bans have accelerated. Trans healthcare access has collapsed. Mass deportation is operational. The Department of Education is being dismantled. Public libraries are under sustained legislative attack.

During this same decade, the dominant tactical mode of the online left has been the cancel campaign. The open letter. The purity test. The pile-on. Every time a public figure makes an unwise remark, the same machine cranks up. Every time, the right harvests the spectacle for fundraising and recruitment.

Meanwhile, the book bans keep accelerating. The actual children most vulnerable to censorship are no safer than they were a week ago. Possibly less so.

The dynamic works like this: a community spends years enforcing speech and behavior norms through social punishment. The labor of compliance accumulates. People comply outwardly but seethe inwardly. The pressure has nowhere to go.

Then a strongman arrives — Trump being the most obvious example, but the dynamic is older than him. Then comes the feedback loop: those people who policed you, who made you feel stupid, who shamed you, you don’t have to defer to them anymore. Be as cruel as you want. I, Dear Leader, will absorb the cost.

The strongman does not invent the cruelty. He releases it. He grants permission. And the cruelty, once permitted, gets aimed with surgical precision at the people who did the policing AND the people they claimed they were trying to protect.

This is what gave us Trump. His voters were told for a decade that their concerns were illegitimate, their language was harmful, their jokes were cancellable, and their identities were retrograde. They were told this by people who could not see they were losing them. Then those people lost them.

The children’s literature community is, in miniature, recapitulating that pattern. The most prominent voices in the field are spending their energy disciplining one of their own for an aesthetic critique that every honest editor since Ursula Nordstrom has made.

Here is the first move, because nothing else works without it:

Learn to tell real harm from proxy harm. Book bans are real. Trans kids losing healthcare is real. Deportation is real. A children’s author writing the word “didacticism” in an essay is not on the same scale as actual harm being inflicted on actual children.

Real harm: a school district pulling All Boys Aren’t Blue from shelves.

Proxy harm: a children’s author writing the word “didacticism” in an essay.

The first one is the fight. The second one is a displacement activity that makes the first fight harder. And the reason it is so hard to see is that the displacement activity feels exactly like the real fight. Same vocabulary. Same emotional register. Same group-bonding mechanisms. From inside, you cannot tell them apart.

The exit from this cycle is not “stop caring about real harm.” The exit is “stop confusing real harm with proxy harm.” That is the muscle that needs developing.

After that:

Stop signing letters demanding institutional sanctions for speech offenses. Save the letters for the actual fights — for the book bans, the legislation, the genuine censorship.

Stop letting fear about a contracting industry get laundered into moral outrage. Direct that anger at the structural causes. Do not channel it into ritual sacrifices of colleagues. That is not justice. That is displacement.

Stop handing the right cancel-culture stories. Every disproportionate pile-on is a gift to the people who want to destroy the publishing industry. The cost is paid by authors who write the books conservatives want banned — which is to say, by the authors the pile-on claims to protect.

Extend charitable interpretation to your own. Notice when a sentence that would have been laughed at coming from Sendak is suddenly career-ending coming from someone else. Notice the asymmetry. The asymmetry is the bias. The bias is the engine of the ritual. The ritual is what just put kid lit on the front page of the WSJ opinion section.

Check your ego. Much of the Mac Barnett pile-on followed this simple-minded syllogism. Mac Barnett called children’s literature crud. Therefore, Mac Barnett called authors crud. He called me crud. I am butt-hurt, so I will cancel that arse, Mac Barnett. Ask yourself this — did the person’s comment hurt marginalized authors, or did it hurt me?

“Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be ‘This book is worthless.’”
- George Orwell

Ursula Nordstrom complained because she adored children’s literature. Dorothy Parker shredded books because she took writing seriously. Sendak mocked sentimentality because he respected children too much to patronize them.

Mac Barnett didn’t say anything new. He just said it at the wrong time.

Adult artists used to know that most of their field was mediocre. They said so out loud, and wrote it in letters that were later published and treated as literary scripture. They expected each other to take it, because aesthetic honesty was understood as the price of doing serious work.

Most art is crud. Always has been. The miracle is the small percentage that isn’t. The job is to be in that small percentage. The way you get there is by being honest about the mediocrity, including your own, and putting on your big girl pants and trying harder.

There will be other Mac Barnett(s). The book bans will continue. The imprints will continue to close. The actual fight goes on.

But not against each other.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. Subscribe to Conversations with Carlyn for free content every Wednesday, or become a paid subscriber to get the juicy stuff on Sundays.