Why Children’s Literature Deserves Serious Readers 

I’m currently preparing to teach Children’s Literature for the fifth or sixth time. I should probably know the course by now.

Instead, I’m trying to prepare it as if I’m teaching it for the first time.

That means looking again at books I know well and resisting the temptation to teach what I taught last time. It means asking new questions, noticing different details, and remembering that the students walking into my classroom have never had this particular conversation before.

It also means returning to a question at the heart of the course: Why should we take children’s literature seriously?

We have a strange habit of confusing books written for children with books that have nothing complicated to say. We call them Simple. Sweet. Innocent.

But consider what we're actually giving children to read.

In Roald Dahl’s Matilda, a brilliant little girl discovers that nearly every adult with authority over her is either unwilling or unable to recognize her worth. Suddenly, a funny story about an extraordinarily clever child with extraordinary powers becomes a story about education, power, neglect, and what happens when children know more than the adults in the room.

Maurice Sendak gives us a misbehaving child sent to his room in Where the Wild Things Are. Max gets angry. He imagines an entire world big enough to hold that anger. He becomes king of it. And then he comes home. We can read it as a wonderful adventure—or we can ask what the book is teaching children about having enormous emotions before they have the language to explain them.

Then there is The Phantom Tollbooth, one of my favorites to return to with students. Milo begins the book bored by practically everything. Numbers, words, places, ideas, etc. None of it seems particularly interesting. Then he drives through a mysterious tollbooth and discovers how strange and fascinating the world becomes when you start paying attention. What looks like nonsense becomes an argument for curiosity.

And few books generate a better classroom conversation than Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.

Is it a beautiful story about unconditional love?

Or is it a devastating story about giving until there is almost nothing left of you?

Perhaps it's both.

That's the conversation I want students to have.

Children encounter these stories long before they have academic language for power, identity, emotional regulation, sacrifice, boundaries, or cultural expectations. They may not be able to name those ideas yet.

But they are reading them anyway.

That's one of the reasons I love teaching this course. We get to return to stories meant for young readers carrying all the questions we've learned to ask as adults. A tree isn't suddenly just a tree. A wild rumpus can tell us something about anger. A magical tollbooth can ask what happens when we stop being curious. A little girl standing up to terrifying adults can make us question who gets to have power.

Growing up doesn't mean we have outgrown children's literature. It means we finally have new ways to read it.

Maybe that's also why I'm resisting simply pulling out last year's notes and teaching the course again.

The books haven't changed. But my students will have. The world has. I have.

A serious reader understands that rereading isn't repetition. We bring everything that has happened to us since the last page into the next reading.

So this semester, I'm trying to walk into Children’s Literature without assuming I already know what I'm going to find there.

After all, curiosity is one of the first things children's books teach us.