Parenting & Family Quote by Margaret Mahy

There is a quiet rebuke tucked into Mahy’s calm refusal to pick a “preferred” age group: the idea that writing for children is a ladder you climb until you reach the supposedly serious summit of adult literature. Mahy declines the hierarchy. She treats “very small children” and “young adults” as different instruments, not different levels of prestige, and the verb choice matters. She isn’t “proud” or “noble” about writing for kids; she’s “pleased” when a story “works well.” That’s a craftsperson’s metric, not a marketer’s or a moralist’s.

The subtext is a defense of children’s literature as technical work with real stakes. A story for a toddler lives or dies on rhythm, clarity, and emotional precision; you can’t hide behind cleverness or elaborate backstory. YA, meanwhile, demands velocity and honesty about power, desire, and fear without the protective distance adult fiction often grants itself. Mahy suggests both are hard in different ways, and both can be satisfying when the mechanism clicks.

Contextually, this lands as a distinctly late-20th-century children’s-writer position: resisting the cultural habit of treating kid-facing art as lesser, while also resisting the opposite trap of sanctifying it. Mahy’s standard isn’t innocence or uplift; it’s whether the story functions. The intent is liberating: follow the story’s proper audience rather than forcing the audience to serve the writer’s status.