Like other types of literature, works written especially for children are informed and shaped by the authors’ respective value systems, their notions of how the world is or ought to be. These values—reflecting a set of views and assumptions regarding such things as “human nature,” social organization and norms of behavior, moral principles, questions of good and evil, right and wrong, and what is important in life—constitute authors’ ideologies. They may be idiosyncratic to the individual author, or may reflect and express the values of the culture at large, or of subgroups within the culture.