Parenting & Family Quote by Diana Wynne Jones

“This is ridiculous” lands like a grown-up snapping the chalk in half: not a mild disagreement but a refusal to indulge the low expectations that so often get dressed up as “age appropriateness.” Diana Wynne Jones is defending difficulty as a form of respect. The repetition (“ridiculous… wholly ridiculous”) is performative impatience, a way of shaming the gatekeepers who assume children must be protected from complexity, as if confusion were damage rather than fuel.

Her key move is the phrase “a tiny bit above them.” It’s not an argument for dumping graduate seminars on eight-year-olds; it’s a case for the productive stretch, the mental tiptoe that builds confidence and appetite. Jones is pointing at the real harm: flattening the world to what adults think a child can handle, which quietly trains kids to expect everything to be pre-chewed and immediately mastered.

The Doctor Who reference is a cultural dagger. Doctor Who is famously elastic and messy: time travel paradoxes, shifting lore, tonal whiplash, monsters one week and grief the next. Kids not only cope; they thrive on it, stitching meaning together through pattern-recognition, imagination, and sheer narrative hunger. By saying “can follow absolutely anything,” Jones isn’t literally claiming omniscience; she’s exposing how often “too complex” really means “we don’t trust them” or “we’re bored.”

Contextually, it reads like a rebuke to publishing and educational orthodoxies that sand down stories for marketable “levels.” Jones, who wrote fantasy that never condescends, is arguing that difficulty isn’t a barrier. It’s an invitation.