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Written Japanese ordinarily doesn't use any spaces to separate words. But
Japanese children's books do.

For example, the opening of Tomi Ungerer's _The Three Robbers_ (すてきな 三にんぐみ)

> あらわれでたのは、
>
> くろマントに、 くろい ぼうしの さんにんぐみ。
>
> それはそれは こわーい、 どろぼうさまの おでかけだ。

Are there general rules by which spaces would be inserted? (For example,
always after particles, always at "word boundaries" (suitably defined).) Or do
editors/authors just insert spaces at "natural" reading pauses? (Natural for
small children at least.)

For example, in the same book きがついた is written without spaces (which would be
fine if the rule were "no spaces in phrases which are a unit"), but then だれも
かれも is written _with_ space, but I think of the phrase as a unit.
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orthography punctuation child-speech
Spaces in children's books
This practice is known as
[分{わ}かち書{が}き](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%8F%E3%81%8B%E3%81%A1%E6%9B%B8%E3%81%8D).
As you said, it's not really used in normal written Japanese. Spaces, however,
are used in texts that are mostly kana based, such as those for kids or for
foreigners new to the language. Its purpose is to separate words and to help
avoid confusion. Wikipedia gives the example of:

> こうしまるやさいいち

being interpretable as either `講師丸谷才一` or `こう閉まる野菜市`. If there were spaces,
the writer could clearly indicate as to which one of those the sentence
actually means.

Now as to what the rules are for how to use these spaces,
[this](http://www.writer-support.com/children/writing_matter01.html) website
appears to be dedicated to children's book writers and says some things about
it. It notes that the ways to do 分{わ}かち書{が}き include by [文節]{ぶんせつ} (phrase) or
by [単語]{たんご} (word). However, it mostly seems to be case dependent.
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There's a quick way to know this. The place where a space can be inserted is
roughly the same place where ね can be naturally inserted.

> あらわれでたのは **ね** 、  
>  くろマントに **ね** 、くろい **ね** 、ぼうしの **ね** 、さんにんぐみ。  
>  それはそれは **ね** 、こわーい **ね** 、どろぼうさまの **ね** 、おでかけだ。

Actually this structure is known as
[文節](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%87%E7%AF%80). Basically, a 文節 starts
with a noun/adjective/verb/adverb/etc, optionally followed by one or more
subsidiary verbs and particles.

Inserting spaces between all words (i.e. `あらわれ で た の は`) is overkill in most
cases.

But this rule is not strict, and you will find a lot of exceptions in
children's books and old video games. Don't worry too much.
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Because it's just kana it would be easy to get confused and join together
words improperly (foreign learners can certainly attest to this). Although
it's a different language with different rules, as a general rule of language
processing, providing visual separation enhances readability until such point
that the learner can move on to kanji and/or quickly separate words.

Note that this same style — words separated by spaces but conjoined with their
particles — is present in proper Korean writing. For instance, the place
marker で in Japanese equates with 에 in Korean. In Korean this is more
important because in common use the entire language is written using the
alphabet (hangul), whereas everyone in Japan is expected to use kanji.

Is it proper? No. Does it aid learning in the short term? Yes.
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