C.S. Lewis dedicates his classic The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to his goddaughter Lucy with the following words:
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. 
I’m not sure I ever reached an age when I considered myself “too old for fairy tales,” but there have certainly been seasons in which other things seemed more important. Pursuing an English major and Classical Education minor at a liberal arts college, I was up to my eyes in Aquinas and Aristotle, Faulkner and de Tocqueville. My dorm room was infested with Greek flashcards. Books that I had read, highlighted, and tabbed piled up—books that I hadn’t read piled up higher. (I used to joke that the only thing I got from my English major was a stronger grasp of how many things I had not read.)
Counterintuitively, it was around that time that I started picking up my childhood books again. Not only the fairy tales like The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but also the books that had taught me, as a girl, what girlhood was: Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon, A Little Princess, The Secret Garden. I developed a habit of reading a few chapters of these long-forgotten childhood classics before I fell asleep at night. Somehow, I knew it was precisely what I needed. Over the years, I have turned to children’s literature again and again, and developed more articulate ideas on why this practice was so fruitful.
Children’s literature is simple.
I first started reading children’s books because they were the books I had on hand, and they didn’t feel intimidating. Their simple language was easy to read after a day of slogging away at a medieval theology paper in the library. I already knew what was going to happen in these books, and that was somehow soothing, making them perfect bedtime reading.
Many of us have favorite books from childhood we’d love to revisit, or childhood classics we never got to read. Unlike some other classics we may wish we had read (War and Peace is my personal nemesis), children’s literature is easy to “catch up on.” If you have your own children, you can even read books with them that you wish you had read yourself, enriching both your and their experience.
In its simplicity, children’s literature reminds us that literature does not need to be complex and wordy in order to have deep reservoirs of meaning. Especially those of us who dwell in lofty academic spheres sometimes need this reminder—the simplest way of saying something is often the best way.
Children’s literature is (or should be) moral.
Admittedly, children’s literature, especially the classics, can be a tiny bit moralistic. Often the lessons meant to be drawn from it—being happy without wealth, for example, or caring for those around us—can be a little bit on-the-nose.
But when I returned to children’s literature as an adult, I felt that touch of moralism was a good corrective. Sara Crewe’s patience in A Little Princess, the healing powers of human connection as depicted in The Secret Garden, Anne Shirley’s indefatigable enthusiasm—I felt all these traits reawakening my desire for a beautiful life, just as they are meant to do for children. It was a fruitful moment to reflect on the woman I had meant to become when I had been formed by these incredible characters—and the woman I was actually becoming.
I certainly don’t think all literature should be as morally simple as these “fairy tales” and formative children’s books. But it can be helpful to return to the basic categories of good and evil as they are laid out in the books we read to children—if only because they can help us discern good and evil in other books, and even in our own lives. It’s easy for me, as an adult sophisticate, to justify my impatience or envy or discontent. But when I’m faced with a children’s book that explains in simple and compelling terms that it is better to be patient and kind and grateful, I have to feel a little silly. I knew as a child that these things were true, and I know it as an adult too.
Children’s literature awakens our wonder for life.
When we are children, everything is new. It is always funny to me to revisit a book I read as a young child and understand a turn of phrase or description that I never understood before, because I didn’t have enough context for it. More frequently, though, reading children’s literature renews my wonder at life because it affords the perspective of a child who is experiencing it all for the very first time.
Whether it is Mary running all over the garden with Dickon and discovering that the rose bushes are alive underneath all their old, rotten branches, or Anne accidentally dyeing her hair green, or Polly and Digory exploring the rafters of a whole row of houses, children’s literature reminds me that life is extremely interesting, after all. It can be easy to forget this in the daily slog of adulthood, when one day seems very much like another. In a children’s book, every day is a new step in an adventure.
Over the years, my own adventure has led me through a master’s in theology and a Ph.D. in Theology, the Imagination, and the Arts, and now I’m lucky enough to be reading “fairy tales again” as part of my daily work.
As a reading guide for an app called Read With Me, I’m currently taking a group of people through Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, a classic I’ve read many times. Still, every day new things jump off the pages. If you want to make reading children’s literature a part of your life, you’d be welcome to join us. I’m also including a list of my favorite children’s classics, both those that are well-known and those that are a bit less well-known, if you want to build a children’s literature reading practice of your own!
- The Hobbit
- The Chronicles of Narnia
- Winnie the Pooh
- An Episode of Sparrows
- Little Women
- Little Men
- Pollyanna
- Caddie Woodlawn
- Anne of Green Gables (and series)
- Emily of New Moon
- A Little Princess
- The Secret Garden
- The Lost Prince
- Swallows and Amazons
- The Wind in the Willows
- The Princess and the Goblin
- A Girl of the Limberlost
- Charlotte’s Web
- Little House on the Prairie
- Heidi
- Peter Pan
- Around the World in Eighty Days
- Railway Children
- Five Children and It
- The Little Prince
- Pippi Longstocking
- The Great Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
- Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales
- The Blue Fairy Book
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer