ANXIETY ABOUT BRITISH children reached a high last week, with commentators seizing on a Unicef report that Britain comes bottom for child happiness, Professor Robin Alexander claiming that primary schools are being torn apart by crass popular culture, and fears about childhood obesity prompting a change in law.

We have parents castigated for being “helicopters”, who never allow children to discover how to manage a degree of risk, and the main political parties moving towards encouraging marriage to make children feel more secure. Meanwhile, literacy is declining at an alarming rate. How are all these things connected?

David Almond, the seer of Northumberland, has written an extraordinary novel for younger readers in My Dad's a Birdman, which may give us some clues. The motherless Lizzie is a little girl who has taken over the running of her home because her dad is having what looks like a breakdown or is suffering from manic depression. She makes the breakfast, rouses him before going off to school, gets him to eat and listens to his crazy plans to enter a local competition.

The Great Human Bird Competition has invited people to present their various contraptions for propulsion into the air. Lizzie's dad believes he can fly with no more than “wings and faith”, and is so obsessed by the subject that not only is he unshaven and going about in pyjamas and dressing gown, he's eating worms, beetles and flies. In a cupboard, unknown to Lizzie, is a costume he has made from feathers. With these, he intends to fly.

Ever since the remarkable Skellig, Almond has been rather obsessed with winged creatures himself, and you might expect that, just as the skeletal Skellig turns out to be a real angel, Lizzie's dad will actually manage to fly. But this isn't a book about that kind of miracle; it's about what can be achieved when parents — however bonkers, misguided, poor or bereaved — bother to engage with their children.

Lizzie's Auntie Doreen is there to provide home-baked nurturing in the shape of heavy, earth-bound dumplings and common sense, but it's the dad who shares joy, memories and dreams even when their joint attempt seems to fail. The point is that they sew, dream, jump and try together. It could be a metaphor for reading itself, and the love of books — or it could be about any activity that turns out to be worthwhile. Almond understands how faith, imagination and courage are necessary if children are not to be deprived of wonder.

Instead, we are like Auntie Doreen, obsessed with making sure that our children know how to do sums and can spell Czechoslovakia. We dismiss the marvellous men (and women) in their flying machines as “blithering boops... nits, ninnies, nincompoopy noddleheads” when we should be applauding their (thoroughly British) inventiveness and daring. In many ways, this book reminds me of Philip Pullman's classic fairytale The Firework-maker's Daughter, which is also about a child rescuing her father through discovering the demon of true creativity. Lizzie is the wise child who knows her own father, returning him to life.

My Dad's a Birdman is an enchantingly wise, funny and subversive book. The lucid, comical, brightly coloured illustrations by Polly Dunbar owe much to Quentin Blake, and strike just the right note. Children of 5 to 7 will love it, but the ones who should take it most to heart are adults. I fear it will preach only to the converted, but if you know a depressed child, or a despairing parent, this could be just the ticket.

My Dad's A Birdman by David Almond

Walker, £8.99

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