> I'm not sure that 9-year-olds care about "Good Art", they just care about the things they're exposed to
This is more anecdote than research, but from several authors who told stories to children successfully - Tolkien, Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll), Richard Adams (of Watership Down fame) - kids can certainly tell an _engaging_ story from a boring one, and kids of all age can turn their noses up at an overly preachy story.
I believe Adams says in his foreword that his girls begged him to write the story down because "it's so much better than some of the other books you read us".
Tolkien and Lewis disagreed on whether Narnia was too in-your-face preachy, but the Narnia series is certainly among the popular examples of children's literature out there.
> kids can certainly tell an _engaging_ story from a boring one, and kids of all age can turn their noses up at an overly preachy story.
Hmm that's interesting, I would definitely believe it. (I was one of those kids that didn't get past Prince Caspian until his late 20s. Although I didn't recognise it as preachy when I was younger, just not all that interesting.)
> Tolkien and Lewis disagreed ...
This reminds me of David Eddings vehemently declaring Tolkien far too prissy (his word iirc) for high fantasy - that was my first exposure to the "all art is an evolving conversation" perspective, without realising it.
I wonder if -- as far as books for 9-year-olds go -- the conversation has stalled and therefore lost interest, even from a child's perspective. The publishing/entertainment world has poured enormous amounts of money into the previous generation's teenage years (Harry Potter, Twilight, etc), maybe we forgot/decided not to invest in Good Art for the next round of younger kids while that was happening.
I'm still biased in favour of screen time as a primary issue, but I could also see lower publishing, advertising (etc) investment in that age group as a huge confounding problem.
This is more anecdote than research, but from several authors who told stories to children successfully - Tolkien, Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll), Richard Adams (of Watership Down fame) - kids can certainly tell an _engaging_ story from a boring one, and kids of all age can turn their noses up at an overly preachy story.
I believe Adams says in his foreword that his girls begged him to write the story down because "it's so much better than some of the other books you read us".
Tolkien and Lewis disagreed on whether Narnia was too in-your-face preachy, but the Narnia series is certainly among the popular examples of children's literature out there.