There's a temptation, when you write for children, to make sure they "get it." You tell the story, and then — just to be safe — you add a line at the end that says what it meant. And so the lesson learned that day was that honesty is always best.
We don't do that, and we won't.
A good story doesn't need a moral stapled to the end, because the meaning is already inside it, carried by what happens. When the boy lets the wind out of the jar and feels it rush back around him, a child understands something about holding on and letting go that no closing sentence could improve. Say it out loud and you actually take something away — you turn an experience the child had into a fact they were told.
Kids are better readers of stories than we give them credit for. They feel the shape of a thing. They notice when the proud one is humbled and the patient one is rewarded, and they file it away somewhere deeper than instruction reaches. The folklorists have known this for a century: the tale teaches precisely because it doesn't lecture.
So our stories end where stories should end — on the last true image, not on an explanation. We trust the child in the bed to do the rest. They always do.
Lumi · Lumi