The Three Forces Reshaping the World of Children’s Books

The KidLit Creator’s Chronicle – Issue #56

Childhood has changed. Three forces are converging, and together they’ve created a situation unlike any other in the history of children’s publishing. This makes writing more important than it has ever been and more worth doing well.

This week I want to walk you through all three.

Force 1: Screens

The first force that we are all well familiar with is screens. Children ages 5 to 8 averaged 3 hours and 38 minutes of screen time per day in 2025. Children under two already average over an hour a day, including a few minutes of short-form video.

In 2020, kids were only watching one minute of short-form videos per day, and that was up to 14 minutes in 2025. Short-form video causes repeated exposure to rapid-fire content, and what that does is it changes what the brain registers as stimulating. When kids watch shorts, most other things feel boring by comparison.

In a large Canadian study of 3-year-olds, children who spent 2 or more hours per day on screens were 30% to 90% more likely to show behavioural issues, nearly twice as likely to struggle with vocabulary, and significantly more likely to miss key developmental milestones.

Screen, including video games, time also leads to depressive symptoms and attention problems.

While we’re becoming more and more aware of the harm it can cause, most parents admit that they rely on screen time to help them manage their parenting responsibilities, even if they feel guilty about it.

Kids are impressionable, and in many ways our kids are being raised by Disney, Netflix, YouTube and Roblox. Often, we can’t even control which content they consume, especially if they’re watching YouTube or shorts. But even if you choose each thing they watch, they are spending more time learning values and life views from screens than from their parents in many cases. This affects (hugely) how they see life, themselves and others.

On top of this, there are ads popping up before videos and movies, adding even more short-form content and noise. There are ads on the side of YouTube, and no matter the platform, there are thousands of videos to choose from. So much noise.

Books are the one oasis in the middle of the desert for children. Quiet, calm time. A book contains a full story with a beginning, middle, and end, unlike shorts. For picture books, kids get quality time with an adult, a time for real connection, and it has a completely different mental and emotional payoff than spending time on a screen.

Force 2: Children’s Mental Health

The second force is a crisis in children’s mental health. Many factors are contributing to this, including screens. But it’s much more than that.

Many kids have overscheduled lives, moving from activity to activity with little unstructured time to play with other kids. There is a major decline in neighbourhood play and the freedom to play outdoors. With smaller families, kids have fewer siblings and extended family relationships.

Due to constant external stimulation, there’s no room for boredom, imagination, and creating. We’d play outside in the mud for two hours and find imaginative ways to entertain ourselves. Now kids simply reach for a screen.

Time in nature is proven to help with emotional regulation, but kids are getting less time in nature.

There’s also a lot of exposure to social comparison, for instance, in areas like appearance, popularity, and achievement, before kids have really formed an identity. This can make them feel inadequate or pressured from a young age. News and social media are inherently designed to provoke emotion at a high level, often fear and outrage, and most of this is not age appropriate for kids.Screen time is also proven to contribute to feelings of loneliness.

On top of this, parents themselves are on their phones and on screens a lot and distracted. Many parents also work longer hours. In a lot of homes, shared routines, including bedtime reading, have been replaced with individual screen use in separate rooms. In 2012, 64% of parents would read with their children under five frequently at home. Now it’s only 41%.

All of this combined has caused more depression and mental health problems for children today.

Since 2012, the number of parents reporting that children have too much schoolwork to have time for books has nearly doubled from 25% to 49%. Busy, overscheduled, screen-filled days are decreasing reading

The sad thing is that, by not reading with kids from a young age, many kids read less when they get older as well. Children who are read to daily are almost three times as likely to choose to read independently compared to children who are only read to weekly. They don’t learn that reading is something fun they can do, and they spend more time on a screen instead. Many associate reading only with school and homework, and this often makes them feel like it’s something to perform well in only. It takes the joy out of reading.

This is a vicious cycle, because reading can help with mental health. But the same problems that reading can help solve is causing kids to read less. For young kids, reading with their parents helps to overcome loneliness and isolation. There is a lot of research that shows that the more frequent a parent reads with their child, the better the child functions socially.

Books teach empathy: socially themed picture books promote better social behaviour in young children. Books help with emotional intelligence and vocabulary, helping kids to express what they feel and thus manage it better. Books can also help with anxiety and self-esteem.

Force 3: AI

If you read 30 April’s KidLit Creator’s Chronicle, 5 self-publishing changes children’s book authors need to know, you may remember that Draft2Digital has started charging fees because 70% of books submitted to their platform were blocked for being low-quality, AI-generated “book spam.” The fees are primarily aimed at deterring low-quality. In 2024, the volume of material coming into the Draft2Digital platform was trending at roughly 50% more than usual, much of it AI-generated. The COO of Draft2Digital noted it’s easy to spot the bad actors, because “normal authors don’t release 10 books in a day.” Barnes and Noble are doing comparable clamp downs.

I have written several articles and in Children Deserve Better Than AI-Generated Stories: How to Avoid AI scams, Create an Authentic Book, and More I covered how Amazon was being flooded with AI-generated children’s books. The article includes examples of AI writing and AI illustrations. Because authors can create several books a day or a week with AI, there’s more noise than ever before.

In a world where we need high-quality books more than ever to help our children’s mental health and combat the attention-suck from screens, the market is being flooded with AI slop instead of the beautiful, high-quality books we really need.

On top of this, AI affects our creativity and cognitive ability severely. I explored that in this article: The Hidden Cost of Letting AI Do Your Writing: What the Research Says About Creativity, Craft, and Cognitive Decline. When authors use AI, this endangers the quality of our literature in more ways than AI produced books. It causes a cognitive decline in those creating the books.

In 2023, author Jane Friedman discovered a book being sold on Amazon under her own name. It was written entirely by AI, designed to capitalise on her reputation. It was listed on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop. She had no idea it existed until a reader told her. Unfortunately, a lot of people are more interested in a quick buck than in creating a high-quality, human book.

While this is bringing about a lot of changes in the self-publishing world, these are already being met by policy changes on self-publishing platforms.

Creating a beautiful, high-quality, human-created book is not only more important now than it has ever been, but it also gives you a chance to stand out from the noise.

When all these forces come together

These forces are not separate problems, and they don’t exist in isolation.

We live in a world where we are constantly surrounded by screens, constantly stimulated, and getting out in nature less and spending less quality time with other humans. Now AI is adding another dynamic that can worsen many of these problems and also prevent many of them from being solved effectively, as it takes us further away from where we should be heading in many ways (creativity, imagination, the ability to learn and process information, and human connection).

It all leads to disconnection.

Kids are disconnected from nature, from unstructured play, from their parents, from their own inner lives, and with AI, “authors” become disconnected from their own books, and AI books are disconnected from humanity.

Over to You

I would really love to know your thoughts on this. Which of these three forces concern you the most? Or all of them? And why?

Next KidLit Creator’s Chronicle

Together, these three forces have created a situation unlike any other in the history of children’s publishing. So, what does it take to write a book that actually meets this situation? That’s what we’re going to look at in the next KidLit Creator’s Chronicle.