The Case for Adults Never Putting Down Children's Books

A cultural writer makes a personal and intellectual case for adults keeping children's literature at the center of their reading lives — not as nostalgia, but as a legitimate cognitive and creative practice. She describes purging six boxes of adult classics in 2020, including Moby-Dick, Robert Caro, and Joan Didion, while preserving 50-plus picture books she's carried since the 1970s. The deliberate swap, she argues, wasn't regression — it was a reprioritization.

The piece draws heavily on Mac Barnett's new book Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children, in which the prolific children's author argues that dismissing kids' literature is a 'literary misdemeanor' — a failure to recognize not just children's capacity, but human potential broadly. Barnett contends that children are actually superior readers in key ways: their minds are 'perceptive, flexible, and open-minded,' and because the world is still new to them, they engage with stories more deeply and without the calcified expectations adults bring. He notes that picture books uniquely create a liminal interpretive space, where words and images split the narrative labor and demand the reader actively bridge the gap — a cognitive exercise many adults have let atrophy.

Literary scholar Alison Waller offers the concept of 'childness' — distinct from 'childlike,' which carries condescension — as a framework for understanding why childhood reading persists in adult identity. The term, coined by critic Peter Hollindale, describes a shared ground between the remembering adult and the remembered child, suggesting that rereading early books is less about regression and more about acknowledging a 'continuum of identity.' The children's literature editor Ursula Nordstrom captured the spirit succinctly: she called herself 'a former child' who hadn't forgotten a thing.

The practical argument is that picture books model qualities that the best adult nonfiction and literary journalism also prize: economy of language, formal innovation, willingness to break convention, and attention to small, surprising details. The piece name-checks John McPhee on oranges, Maggie Nelson on blue, and a journalist's deep-dive on bread as examples of adult writing infused with what might be called childness. A new Los Angeles children's bookstore, Wolfcat Books, whose owner refuses to call it a children's store because she believes the books are for everyone, exemplifies the growing cultural push to destigmatize adult engagement with the genre. A C.S. Lewis quote on its door frames the argument neatly: some people only become old enough to read fairy tales again.