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Growing up has become associated with outgrowing certain pleasures: picture books, fairy tales, stories that speak openly about wonder and fear, villains and heroes. But adulthood does not actually require abandoning the things that first shaped how we experience the world.
Recently, Anna Holmes wrote about moving across the country in 2020 and donating boxes of adult literary classics but refusing to part with the children’s books she owned. Those stories were not just sentimental objects; they preserved a way of engaging with the world that adulthood often trains out of us.
The children’s author Mac Barnett argues that “when we dismiss children’s books, what we’re really doing is failing to recognize the potential of children.” Holmes extends the thought: “In dismissing children’s books, adults fail to recognize the potential of people.”
Children approach stories with a flexibility that many adults lose: They tolerate nonsense and accept strange rules, as long as the story can delight them. As adults, we often replace that openness with efficiency and skepticism, flattening delight into something more practical.
Maybe rereading children’s books is not really about returning to childhood. It is about recovering a way of moving through the world with a little more curiosity, a little less certainty, and a greater willingness to be surprised.
On Children’s Books
What Adults Lose When They Put Down Children’s Books
By Anna Holmes
Grown-ups who dismiss literature for kids aren’t just snobbish—they’re missing out.
What Rereading Childhood Books Teaches Adults About Themselves
By Emma Court
Whether they delight or disappoint, old books provide touchstones for tracking personal growth. (From 2018)
65 Essential Children’s Books
Illustrated titles that teach kids to love literature
Still Curious?
- Will children’s books become catalogs of the extinct? “As an environmental journalist and a parent, I worry that the animals in my son’s bedtime stories will disappear before he learns they’re real,” Tatiana Schlossberg wrote in 2022.
- What parents lose when they don’t read to their kids: Sharing books with my children was about a lot more than literacy, Ilana Kurshan wrote last year.
Other Diversions
- 25 sensational books to read this summer
- The best graduation speech is one nobody remembers.
- The most surprising part of Stephen Colbert’s late-night run
PS
My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “Tulip Time in Holland, Michigan, is pure magic. I live on a Tulip Lane (which means there are thousands of planted tulips for all to enjoy) and I literally never get over the beauty of it all. I constantly find myself saying, ‘Oh, WOW!’” Vanessa H., from Michigan, writes.
We’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Rafaela
The post How to Read Like a Child Again appeared first on The Atlantic.
