A book can help with
For the child pulled both ways at once, desperate to grow up and not quite ready to.
Children are forever caught between the two. One minute they’re furious at being treated like a baby, the next they want to be carried up to bed. Growing up means gaining things and losing things at the same time, and a child feels both without being able to explain either.
A book gives that muddle a shape. Stories about characters stretching towards independence, or looking back fondly at being small, let a child know that both feelings are allowed at once. They also mark the passing of time gently, which children find surprisingly comforting.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
Getting bigger
For the very youngest, growing up is thrilling and slightly alarming in equal measure. These mark it warmly.
Titch is the smallest, with the smallest of everything, next to his big brother and sister, until the tiny seed he plants grows into something enormous. It captures exactly the frustration of being the littlest, and gives it a triumphant ending. Simple, warm, and perfect for a small child who’s tired of being small.
or on Bookshop.org
Leo the tiger can’t read, write, draw or even eat tidily, and his father frets, but his mother knows he’ll get there in his own good time, and eventually he does, all at once. It’s enormously reassuring for a child who’s behind their friends at something, and for the parent watching. A gentle argument for patience.
or on Bookshop.org
Big enough, small enough
Now they can feel both pulls at once and even talk about them. These hold the wanting-to-be-big and missing-being-little together.
A four-year-old looks back with enormous nostalgia on her babyhood, all the things she couldn’t do then and can do now. It’s very funny, and it lets a child feel proud of how far they’ve come while still enjoying a sentimental look back. Lovely for the child hovering between big and little.
or on Bookshop.org
A child insists they’re big enough for all sorts of things, and discovers what they can genuinely manage alone and where a grown-up hand is still welcome. It honours the push for independence without pretending a child is bigger than they are. Good for the one who wants to do everything themselves.
or on Bookshop.org
Changing, and staying yourself
Older children start to feel the shift more seriously: things they’ve outgrown, things ahead. A fuller story helps them make sense of it.
Ramona is old enough now to take herself to school and help at home, and finds that growing up brings responsibilities and indignities alongside the freedoms. Cleary is perfect on the ordinary business of being eight, and children have loved Ramona for generations. Funny, true, and comforting about the awkward in-between years.
or on Bookshop.org
A boy and three companions wander and talk about kindness, courage and being enough, in a book that works for a child growing up and for the grown-up reading with them. It says gentle, sturdy things about being yourself as you change. Beautiful to look at, and one to keep and come back to.
or on Bookshop.org
On the edge of it
Eleven and twelve is mostly waiting, watching everybody else change at a different speed and wondering whether you are normal. These are written from inside that waiting.
Margaret is almost twelve, newly moved to the suburbs, and worrying in roughly equal measure about bras, periods, fitting in with the other girls and whether she has a religion. Written in 1970 and dated in places, and still the book most women of a certain age remember being handed. It talks about periods directly, which is the point of it.
or on Bookshop.org
Anastasia is ten, keeps lists of things she loves and hates in a secret green notebook, and finds that everything on both lists keeps moving. Her teacher, her parents and her grandmother all look different to her by the end of the year. From 1979 and it shows, and her grandmother dies during the story.
or on Bookshop.org
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Something to do together
A page for marking all the things a child can do now that they couldn’t last year, and the small things they’d still like to keep. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
A child can want to be grown-up and want to be babied on the very same afternoon, and neither is a step backwards. Growing up isn’t a straight line, and these books quietly say so.
So let them be little when they need it and big when they’re ready, and try not to hurry either. Most children reach for the next thing themselves as soon as they’re genuinely ready for it.
For you, the grown-up
There’s a companion page for grown-ups over on the main Book Quote Therapy library, with books for adults looking back on their own growing up.
Read the grown-up version →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.