Most Personalized Children’s Books Aren’t Really Personalized

Type “personalized book for kids” into any search engine and you will find dozens of companies offering the same promise: your child becomes the hero. You enter a name. You pick a skin tone, a hairstyle, maybe glasses or freckles. A few days later a genuinely lovely hardcover arrives with your child’s name printed through it.

These books are good at what they do. But there is something worth noticing about almost all of them, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

The swap test

Here is a single question that sorts the entire category:

If the answer is yes, the story is a template. It was written once, for everyone, and your child has been inserted into it. If the answer is no — if the story only works because of that particular person — then the book was genuinely written for them.

Run that test on the market and the results are consistent. The big personalized book companies write a fixed narrative and vary the character art around it. The adventure is identical whether the hero is your daughter in Ohio or a child in Lisbon. The name is unique. The story is not.

Two different things get called personalization

It helps to separate them, because the category uses one word for both.

Character personalization

The character looks like your child. You choose from preset hair, skin and clothing options, or upload a photo that gets turned into a cartoon likeness. Some companies do this remarkably well and let you add siblings, grandparents and pets. What stays fixed is the plot.

Narrative personalization

The story itself is unique because it comes from a real life. Nobody else can receive this book, because nobody else has this history. Character personalization is about how the book looks. Narrative personalization is about what the book is actually about.

Almost every company in the personalized book category does the first. Very few attempt the second, and the reason is straightforward: writing a genuinely different story for every single customer is hard, and templates scale.

How the options actually compare

Two categories tend to come up when people go looking for a meaningful book about their family. They solve genuinely different problems.

The row that matters most is the second-to-last one. Every memoir service requires the person at the centre of the book to sit down and tell their own story, week after week, for a year. That is a wonderful thing when it happens. It also rules out the situations where families most want a book: when someone has already died, when illness or dementia has taken the ability to write, or simply when the person in question will never, ever fill in a weekly email.

Why we make the grandparent the hero

Making the child the hero is the obvious move, and it is what the category does. We do the opposite, for a reason that comes out of research rather than taste.

Psychologists Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush at Emory University spent years studying what children know about their families. Children who knew more about their family history — where their grandparents grew up, what hard times the family had come through — showed higher self-esteem, lower anxiety and a stronger sense of control over their own lives. Fivush called the result the intergenerational self: the sense of belonging to something that started long before you did.

A book in which a child is already the hero is a lovely gift. A book about the grandmother who crossed an ocean at nineteen gives that child something different: the knowledge that they come from someone who did hard things and survived them.

So which should you buy?

Genuinely, it depends on what the book is for.

• A birthday gift that makes a five-year-old shriek with delight. A template personalized book is hard to beat, and cheaper than the alternatives.
• A full life story from someone willing to write it. A memoir service will give you hundreds of pages in their own words. Nothing else comes close for depth.
• A record of who someone was, in a form a child will actually pick up. That is the gap we built for, and it is the one case where a template cannot help you.

The question worth asking before you buy anything is simply this: in twenty years, which of these books will still mean something? Usually the answer is the one that could not have been written about anybody else.