A book can help with
For the child who is always slightly further away than you last saw them.
Some children are drawn outward. They wander off in shops, climb higher than you’d like, and want to know what’s round the next corner. It’s wearing to supervise and it is exactly the instinct that makes a confident, capable person.
Books feed it safely. Stories about setting off, getting slightly lost and finding the way home give a child the thrill of the adventure and the reassurance of the return, which is the combination they actually want. They also tend to send a child straight outside afterwards.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there. The nature page has more for the outdoors.
Off round the corner
A toddler explores the garden, the stairs and the inside of a cupboard, and that is quite enough territory to be going on with. These are journeys on a very small scale.
Rosie the hen walks round the farmyard entirely unaware that a fox is following her and coming off worse at every turn. The words tell one story and the pictures tell another, which is a joke small children adore being in on. Also quietly useful for over, under and round about.
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Mr Gumpy sets off in his boat and lets everybody climb aboard, and the outcome is exactly what you would expect. Nobody is told off when it goes wrong, they all go back for tea. A Greenaway Medal winner and still one of the calmest books about a day out going sideways.
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Setting off
For little ones the adventure needs to end at home. These give the journey and the safe return.
A lonely girl draws a door on her wall with a red crayon and steps into an extraordinary world. There are no words at all, so a child narrates the adventure themselves, which makes it their own expedition. Breathtaking to look at.
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A family sets off through grass, river, mud and snow, with a sound for each, and races all the way home again. It is made for shouting along to and acting out, and it turns a walk into an expedition. A modern classic.
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Further afield
Older children want a proper adventure, with genuine risk and their own resourcefulness at the centre.
A robot washes up on a wild island and must work out how the natural world functions in order to survive there. It’s gripping and full of real observation about animals and seasons. Hugely popular with this age and a wonderful read-aloud.
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Children sail, camp and run their own expedition on a lake, entirely without adults organising it. It is the great book about competent children left to get on with things, and it still makes children want to go outside and build something. Long, and worth it.
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A long way from home
By this age exploring means somewhere genuinely unfamiliar, with the adults out of reach. Each of these puts a child a very long way from anything they know.
Michael goes overboard from his family’s boat in the night and washes up on an island that already has somebody living on it. Most of the book is the practical business of staying alive and slowly earning a stranger’s trust. Short, and a fine read-aloud.
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Maia is orphaned, sent from London to relatives on the Amazon, and finds the jungle far more welcoming than the family she was posted to. Ibbotson writes the river and the forest so well that children come out wanting to go. Smarties Prize winner and a proper old-fashioned adventure.
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Something to do together
A page for planning a small expedition of your own: where to go, what to take, and what you found. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
The instinct to roam is worth protecting rather than only containing. Children who are given a bit of freedom, in doses that suit their age, tend to become better at judging risk rather than worse.
So widen the boundaries gradually as they show they can handle it, agree clear rules about how far and when to come back, and try to let them do the last bit themselves. A child who has never been trusted to explore has no practice at it when it counts.
These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.