A book can help with
For the child who turns a cardboard box into a rocket and disappears for the afternoon.
Imagination is one of the great pleasures of childhood, and one of the most useful things a child owns. It’s how they process the world, entertain themselves, work out what frightens them, and rehearse being other people. A child deep in make-believe is doing something genuinely valuable, even when it looks like nothing at all.
Books feed it. The very best of these light the fuse and send a child off to build a den or invent a game, and they quietly tell them that a mind full of ideas is something to be proud of. Read one, then leave a cardboard box lying about and stand well back.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
Anything can be anything
For the very youngest, imagination is the discovery that anything can be anything. These make that idea irresistible.
To everyone else it’s just a cardboard box; to the rabbit it’s a racing car, a mountain, a burning building. It’s the purest celebration of a child’s imagination there is, and it says without a word of instruction that the best toy is the one you dream up. There’s a companion, Not a Stick, that’s just as good.
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Baby Bear finds a cardboard box and an old colander, and goes to the moon in them. Very young children follow it easily and then go off looking for a box of their own. The pictures carry most of the story, so it works before a child has much language.
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Worlds of their own
Now they can build whole worlds and disappear into them. These are the great picture-book celebrations of that.
Sent to bed without supper, Max sails off to the land of the wild things, is crowned king, and comes home to find his supper waiting and still hot. It’s the great picture book about using your imagination to master a big feeling, and it never loses its power. A classic in every sense.
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A lonely girl draws a door on her bedroom wall with a red crayon and steps through into an extraordinary world. There are no words at all, so a child tells the story themselves, which makes it a wonderful spur to their own imagining. Breathtaking to look at, and lovely for a quiet child.
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Inventing whole worlds
Older children can appreciate imagination as something to value and protect, and stories about children who build worlds of their own.
A group of children turn a rocky hillside into a whole imagined town, with houses and roads and rules of their own, and remember it all their lives. Based on a real childhood, it captures exactly what elaborate make-believe feels like from the inside. Lovely, and it usually sends children straight outside to build something.
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While the other mice gather food for winter, Frederick gathers colours, words and sunshine, and when the cold, grey days come it turns out his harvest was every bit as necessary. It’s a beautiful defence of the dreamers, and reassuring for the child who’s always off in their own head. Short, wise, and quietly moving.
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Somewhere entirely invented
Older children mostly stop playing at other worlds and start reading their way into them instead. Each of these rewards a child who is willing to go along with something odd.
Milo is bored of everything until a tollbooth turns up in his bedroom and he drives through it into a country made entirely of wordplay. Every place he arrives at is an idea taken literally, and children who like that sort of joke fall very hard for it. Dense in places, and worth pushing through the first chapter.
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A village leaves a baby in the forest every year for a witch who turns out to have been rescuing them all along. It is a proper made-up world with its own rules, told in language a child will slow down for. Newbery Medal winner, and there is real sadness in it.
or on Bookshop.org
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Something to do together
A page of starting points for an afternoon of invention: a map to fill in, a den to plan, a world to name. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Imagination isn’t a break from the serious business of growing up, it’s a good part of how it happens. A child inventing a world is practising problem-solving, empathy and courage, all while apparently doing nothing.
So leave room in the week for unstructured, unsupervised nonsense, keep the recycling handy, and resist the urge to organise it for them. The best play is the sort you have nothing to do with.
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 rediscovering their imagination.
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.