We interview Macarena García-González about her book, The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
Our member, Dr. Macarena García-González (Pompeu Fabra University, Spain), talks about her new book, The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction (Routledge, 2025).
Q: What is this book about?
The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction examines how children’s books engage readers in acts of feeling-with and feeling-for others, while also questioning the limits and politics of empathy. Through close readings of contemporary international children’s literature, the book explores how narratives, characters, and visual strategies invite readers to cross cultural, emotional, and ethical boundaries. Rather than celebrating empathy as an unproblematic moral force, the book critically analyses how children’s fiction negotiates difference, vulnerability, and relationality, often revealing tensions between inclusion and exclusion.
Drawing on affect theory, childist criticism, and interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology and media studies, the book illuminates how stories shape young readers’ understanding of social justice, otherness, and care. It focuses on narratives that address challenging topics—such as migration, historical trauma, and environmental crisis—asking how these texts encourage readers to notice, respond to, or even resist emotional identification.
Ultimately, The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction calls for a rethinking of empathy in children’s cultural production—not as a simple bridge between self and other, but as a dynamic, sometimes fragile, ethical practice.
Q: What made you write this book?
This book grew out of my long-standing interest in how children’s literature addresses emotions, ethics, and the social imagination. While empathy is often celebrated as a universal good in educational and cultural contexts, I wanted to question how it actually works in children’s fiction—and for whom. Who gets to be the subject of empathy? Whose stories are told, and how?
In my research, I noticed how some books rely on empathy as a moral shortcut, simplifying complex issues into feelings of pity or compassion. Others, however, invite readers to engage in more critical and open-ended emotional encounters, where difference is not erased but acknowledged and negotiated. I wanted to explore this tension, especially in stories that deal with displacement, historical wounds, or ecological crises—contexts where empathy can both illuminate and obscure.
I also felt that we needed a framework that moves beyond empathy as a purely psychological response, looking instead at its cultural, aesthetic, and political dimensions. By writing this book, I hoped to bring together childist thinking, affect studies, and literary analysis to open new conversations about how children’s fiction can foster not only empathy but also attention, responsibility, and critical solidarity.
An excerpt from the Introduction:
In the context of recent social studies of childhood, researchers have noticed the emergence of “intensive parenting” (Faircloth, 2014) in which social mandates related to the care and training of children are amplified and diversified. Such intensive parenting responds to a perception that children today are more vulnerable to risks impacting their physical and emotional development, and parents are understood as the deterministic figures in preparing children to cope with those risks. The inflated social importance of the parental role is reflected in the picturebook publishing boom. Parents are expected to socialise their children into reading from very young ages. This desired parental function appears in public reading-promotion campaigns as, for example, in Encouraging your child to read, developed by researchers at the Harvard School of Education, which inspired similar campaigns in Latin America.
Reading is supposed to make us better. There are several studies that show correlations between frequent reading and overall enhanced academic achievement. The experiments by Kidd and Castano (2013), described in the introduction, argue that reading for pleasure is beneficial for a healthy Theory of Mind. Others emphasise that reading can lead its audience to resignify traumatic experiences (Véliz et al., 2022) and even achieve greater financial success (Mol et al., 2008). Reading is alleged to be beneficial to almost every aspect of human potential, but these promises are bound to a somewhat narrow understanding of reading as the practice of following and interpreting a linear literary text in print format. These affirmations about the benefits of reading fiction do not investigate or refer to the possible benefits of internet-based reading practices such as audiobooks, webtoons, fan culture, podcasts, films, series, and social media engagement.
The benefits of reading fiction are often shaped as related to the benefits of reading for pleasure. The National Literacy Trust (UK) (Clark & Rumbold, 2006) defines reading for pleasure as, “Reading we do of our own free will, anticipating the satisfaction we will get from the act of reading” and adds that while the initial impetus may have come from someone else, readers continue because they are interested; reading has a promise if related to pleasure, not duty. A key actant on this front is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test taken by 15-year- olds in OECD countries, which measures their ability to use their reading, mathematics, and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. The PISA programme produces evidence on reading for enjoyment by asking children how frequently they read, what they read, and whether they do it out of their own free will. For many years, the results have sounded alarms by indicating that children across the different countries are reading ever fewer fiction books, magazines, or newspapers of their own free will (McGrane et al., 2017). In 2018, the number of students that stated that they considered reading “a waste of time” was higher than ever before. The results were received with considerable concern. Yet the PISA programme defines enjoyment and pleasure quite narrowly. May we also find enjoyment and pleasure in task-oriented reading? Do reading short stories on Wattpad or webtoons count as reading for the children answering the survey?
In this book, we return to the lengthy debate on the use of fiction, appraising its ethical and political dimensions and how they are connected to the affective discourses. At the same time, we examine why the question of why read literature resurfaces so repeatedly, often related to claims about emotional development.