Is it cruel to crush your child’s dreams?

I think it’s for the best if we ban all children’s books containing the word ‘dream’. Dream big, little dreamer, dare to dream… that sort of thing. And especially an unbelievably popular series of books for primary school children, name of Little People, Big Dreams. There are hundreds of titles in this series and nearly four million copies sold worldwide. It’s a rare school that doesn’t stock them. Bin them all, I say.

Perhaps it sounds cruel to actively want to crush a child’s dreams, but it’s for their own good. The books sound cosy, aspirational, unobjectionable, but in fact, deep in children’s young and spongy minds, they’re sowing the poisonous seeds of false ideas that might later do them real harm.

Little People, Big Dreams is series of illustrated books for kids of five and over that tells the life stories of what it considers history’s admirable men and women: Darwin, Mary Shelley, Marie Curie, Malala, Elton John, RuPaul… The books imagine what these high-achieving adults were like as children: bright-eyed and bravely refusing to be cowed.