Two important questions dominate adaptation studies: ‘How has a given adaptation rewritten its sourcetext? Why has it chosen to select and rewrite the sourcetext as it has?’ (Leitch 2007: 332). Examining those questions with respect to screen adaptations of children's metafictions reveals a highly charged and unique intersection of three fields: children's literature, specifically metafiction (self-reflexive fiction); children's film; and transmedial adaptation of meta-referential works.

One challenge of adapting metafiction to film is that, by definition, self-reflexive fiction is specific to its medium. While all texts can be transmediated, subject to the usual affordances of the new medium, contexts of production, and the matrix of choices governing the adaptation, nevertheless metafiction poses a particular challenge to the process. Where medium-specific equivalences can generally be found when they are sought—a way to express the same or similar idea in a different medium— the closest medium-specific equivalent of metafiction is self-reflexive film (metafilm). Transmediating this particular genre of ‘sourcetext’ thus problematizes the role that medium-specific equivalence plays in creating fidelity by focusing on a ‘rival’ medium in the mirror.

Additionally, children's genres feature a number of inherent tensions and paradoxes—not least that they are for children, and are frequently about children and childhood, but are neither produced nor typically procured by children themselves. Children's literature, irrespective of genre, is already at least double by virtue of this dual audience (the child readership and the adult gatekeepers) and also by the ‘hidden adult(s)’ in the work (not least, the adult author). Children's literature furthermore has strong historical ties to didacticism, particularly of foundational literacy education, as well as to play. Children are often delighted in order to be taught, so metafiction's ludic nature is inextricably linked with its inherently didactic nature. At the very least, all metafiction reveals its own construction. Metafiction is always at least double, making the dual natures of story and discourse visible to the reader. As the reader reads the story, so too the metafictional gestures of the text in some way render the discourse opaque and visible.

Children's metafiction is a historically understudied (and often undervalued) genre. Further, while much of the existing theory of metafiction applies equally to children's metafiction—for instance, the devices and strategies employed are the same, in both adult-oriented and children's metafictions—still the child reader presupposed by children's metafiction impacts every aspect of the fictional mode.