As a genre concerned with education and formation, the Bildungsroman provides an excellent vehicle for children’s literature and young adult (YA) fiction, given the latter’s concomitant concerns with childhood development and maturation. In exploring Bildungsromane for children and young adults, this chapter considers the implications of the genre’s hegemonic socialisation for an intended readership of emergent citizens. However, rather than necessarily reflecting or endorsing the Bildungsroman’s traditional generic traits, such as self-development, masculinist values and economic success, evidence emerges of more progressive transformations of that conservative format, exploring issues of gender or class politics, for instance. Such dialogical interrogation of conventional Bildungsromane is showcased within texts ranging from Victorian classics to contemporary YA fiction. Encouragingly, a trend is identified in contemporary YA texts where the Bildung parameters of individualism are reconfigured to include self/other relations from a position of community values rather than individualism and self-reliance. Relatedly, liberal humanism’s fixed ontological threshold is transcended to incorporate posthuman fluidity, while the relationship between self and nation is renegotiated in favour of heterogeneous alien locales. These reconfigured Bildungsromane chart developmental journeys, not towards self-completion but fluid and endless states of becoming.