Not (Just) for Kids
When we return to beloved children’s books or discover new ones as adults, we make peace with our past selves and the people we’ve become.
By Megan Foster
When I said that I preferred a position in the children’s department, my interviewer didn’t believe me. “You want to work there? Are you sure?”
In my several years of bookselling, I’ve come to see just how far-flung the world of children’s literature feels to many adults. Part of this is a reluctance to handsell to children. Not everyone can answer a twelve-year-old’s very specific plea for a heart-wrenching book featuring mean girls and magic. I’ve had coworkers scurry towards me in sheer panic because a six-year-old asked for a chapter book about dogs. I understand how challenging, or outright daunting, it can be. However, I’ve found the issue of adults shirking the kids’ department extends beyond lack of confidence. Many adults just completely lose interest in children’s literature, weaning themselves off YA books sometime in college and leaving their bygone tales of bunnies and fairylands behind. No wonder adult booksellers struggle to recommend children’s books, if they themselves haven’t cracked one open in years. Unfortunately, some adult readers don’t just phase out of children’s literature; they go out of their way to avoid it entirely. Even today, despite their growth in popularity, children’s books are snubbed by elitists who don’t classify them as “real” literature.
Too many people mistake shorter texts as simple ones, and assume their readers are simple-minded, too.
Indeed, even Margaret Wise Brown, arguably one of the greatest picture book authors of all time, believed she was an insufficient writer because of her young audience. So whatever the reason, whether aging out of it or intentionally rejecting it, much of children’s literature lacks adult readership.
This breaks my heart. In extensively rereading my childhood books and devouring contemporary stories for kids, I’ve found that taking up a middle grade novel or picture book transforms and challenges me in ways that adult literature cannot. I believe that reading children’s books is not merely a considerable pleasure but an absolute necessity for adults.
C.S. Lewis once wrote to his goddaughter, in light of her becoming an adult, that “some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” It’s all too common for people to abandon their old books as they leave their childhoods behind, same as forgetting favorite stuffed animals stashed away in the attic. We are sensitive to what others think as we embark on journeys to college or elsewhere; we are proud of growing older and eschew what brands us as childish. But C.S. Lewis recognized that there comes a time when we settle into adulthood and stop fretting––as much, at least––about other peoples’ perception of how we spend our precious time. More than that, nostalgia sets in and we begin trekking back to the cobwebbed attics to retrieve the things of our youth. The hassles and humdrums of adulthood beg us to reclaim what wonder we beheld so easily as children, often in the form of beloved books.
If I hadn’t given that picture book another chance, then I wouldn’t have seen the ways I’d changed since last laying eyes on its pages.
I’ve encountered adult readers who scoff at these inclinations, even saying that for adults to read, say, YA novels, is nothing but mere escapism. I could easily write another essay, if not a book, about that claim alone. (I could also write an essay about why escapism isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) But I’d argue that taking the time to engage with our treasured childhood stories as adults means challenging ourselves to explore dramatic ways we’ve grown from our skinned–knee, loose–tooth days. When we crack open those books, we encounter our old selves within their pages. It’s a visceral, even transportive experience, to find that a once beloved book can not only take us to fantastical worlds but back to our own past. We may find old doodles or angry marginalia; we may rediscover favorite characters and great epiphanies. As our childhood books take on fresh meaning, we also make peace with our present selves. We grow bigger, and the old stories grow with us. Just as the texts transformed us as children, so too do they change, sometimes in unexpected ways.
It happened for me in my reclamation of The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. I won’t deny that as a kid I absolutely loved all things saccharine. I downed sappy stories more than I ate candy. I wanted endless happily–ever–afters. (Don’t worry, I balanced it out with plenty of macabre, like fairy tales from the good old Brothers Grimm.) It’s no surprise that my tiny mind managed to manipulate texts like Playdoh and find blissful conclusions where they didn’t originally exist––or, at least, not for everyone involved. Such is the case for The Giving Tree. Funnily enough, it isn’t a book children tend to gravitate toward. But I did. I was that kid. My interpretation of the picture book was a story about a compassionate being willingly offering every literal bit of herself to appease a single person. I thought it was nice. I thought it was sweet. Oh, the selfless love! Oh, the sacrifice! I didn’t align myself with the boy–then–man who required such servitude. I wanted to be the tree, to find someone worth losing all of myself for. This, I thought, was what any good little Christian girl should aspire towards: to become a martyr.
I wonder what my Sunday school teachers would’ve made of this.
In becoming a young adult, I packed away my childhood treasures and began to unpack aspects of my conservative, missionary kid, Southern Baptist upbringing. I learned to wrestle with my ever-shifting theologies, as if each day the kaleidoscope changed and so, too, did my views of God. When I began to reject various parts of my past, I also washed my hands of certain stories I once loved––such as The Giving Tree. Straight out of college I moved to New York and got my first bookselling job at Barnes & Noble. I balked at the sight of that bright green book, a visceral reminder of beliefs I’d fiercely begun to deconstruct. I was no longer convinced that being a Christian meant allowing, or even inviting, others to walk all over me; I wanted nothing to do with a book that extolled that belief. I didn’t bother to reread it, of course. I knew what it said. I knew what it meant. At least, I remembered what I thought it said, and thought it meant, as a child. That was enough for me.
But I couldn’t understand why adults flocked to buy The Giving Tree time, and time, and time again. Eventually I gave in and reread it for myself. It was like reading it for the first time.
Only as an adult did I interpret Silverstein’s picture book as slyly humorous, a dark but searing commentary on egregious expectations placed on caregivers: that they are not only meant to make sacrifices, but to sacrifice their very identities to their loved one. Of course, this is only my interpretation. To this day The Giving Tree remains a controversial book, in part because people can’t quite agree on its meaning. I will say that as a child I believed the ending to be happy. As an adult I don’t. But taking it up for the first time in so many years, I didn’t mind. I laughed, and fumed, and cried. It was a gift to pick up a book I’d loved as a child and find that as an adult, I could learn to love it anew. If I hadn’t given that picture book another chance, then I wouldn’t have seen the ways I’d changed since last laying eyes on its pages. When we reread our favorite childhood books, we not only experience the joys of our youth again but come face-to-face with new versions of ourselves we might not otherwise encounter.
Here’s what I suggest. Go to your local library or independent bookstore and find the children’s section.
Then there are the classic children’s books that, for all the times I’ve revisited them, never seem to change. If anything, whatever sentiment I had as a child only deepens with age. It’s as precious as returning to a favorite home cooked meal, or hearing a once forgotten melody. Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon was my favorite book growing up; nothing else could settle me so. To this day it quiets my heart. Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales still makes me cackle because, thank God, the stories remain just as stupid. The more I read Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, the harder I cry. Even as a child I understood that Charlotte had to die, that Wilbur would never find true contentment without the acceptance of death. It still makes me sad. It still gives me hope.
These are the stories I reread to feel like a child again because they force me to relearn simple, deep-seated truths about being human, the fundamentals I first learned while toddling along the streets of China. Sometimes we need to be quiet. Sometimes we need a good laugh. Sometimes we forget that we’re dust.
While I ardently believe in the necessity of rereading stories from our youths, I should also stress the importance of reading new children’s literature. Many authors will testify that writing for children is much, much harder than writing for adults. For one, it’s difficult to say a lot with little text. Ask a poet. For that alone, children’s books done well are often far more impressive to me than any books for adults. What’s more, writing for a young audience requires incredible research, intuition, and empathy. Authors must not only have a keen understanding of how kids might talk, or what kids care about; they must inhabit the mind of a child––ten, twenty, forty years their junior. Adult authors must convince their young readers they’re understood. Consequently, reading contemporary children’s literature often teaches me what kids today wrestle with. It challenges me to consider how I can ensure, to the best of my ability, that things improve for their sake. Contemporary books empower kids to tell their own stories; they encourage adults like me to listen.
It is a humbling thing, to read a story for a younger audience and find that I, too, have a lot to learn. I never would’ve considered the serious need for well-timed profanity until reading Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s masterpiece Fighting Words, a Newbery-honor winning novel about a girl in the foster care system. While I grew up after Columbine, I was fortunate not to experience a childhood filled with the incessant threat of gun violence. Jasmine Warga’s novel The Shape of Thunder, which explores the aftermath of a school shooting, showed me just a small piece of what kids throughout the country have experienced. Before reading A.S. King’s young adult novel Switch, I hadn’t realized the world of burdens current teens carry––ones that we adults have placed on their shoulders. In part, I read so often because I have an insatiable curiosity, and nothing teaches me quite like children’s literature.
Here’s what I suggest. Go to your local library or independent bookstore and find the children’s section. Choose your old favorites, and find a few new ones. You may be surprised by just what you’ve forgotten, and by what you learn about yourself. When you return from the island of wild things or the castle in the sky or whatever place you visit, I hope you rediscover reasons to love our own wide little world. I hope you can make it better for all the kids in it. Better yet, I hope you’re old enough and wise enough to think like a child again.
Megan Foster earned an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and has been a children’s bookseller across New England. She currently lives in New Haven with her husband and two cats.
