Four Tips For Choosing A Great Children’s Book

The battle over “banned books” has consumed school board meetings and cable news for years. Parents are right to object to sexually explicit content and ideological books that use the innocence of childhood as a delivery vehicle for adult political agendas.

But opposition is not enough. When it comes to our kids, we shouldn’t ask “What’s the worst that they should avoid?” but rather “What’s the best that we can give them?” 

Unfortunately, most children’s books — even the inoffensive, popular, widely recommended ones — are not the best. Here’s how to recognize books that are not only worth your child’s time now, but will serve them for a lifetime.

1. Accept that reading alone is not enough

Before we can choose a great children’s book, we have to dispense with the idea that reading, in itself, is always worthwhile. The words on the back of a cereal box and the words of Homer’s “Odyssey” are two different types of reading altogether. That’s because reading is more than decoding the English language. It is how children encounter ideas, meet characters worth imitating or pitying, and begin to understand what it means to be human. The content is not incidental. It’s the point.

2. Search for beautiful illustrations

Illustrations draw children in long before they can recognize a letter or spell out a word. Yet many of the most popular picture books feature bright, cartoonish, deliberately simple figures. Scan the children’s book display at the front of your local library, and you’re likely to find books such as “Captain Underpants,” “Tyrannosaurus Drip,” “2 Pirates + 1 Robot,” or “The Bad Guys” series. Their characters are often misshapen and ugly, the titles in scrawled letters, the colors glaring — and the content irresistible in the short term and grating in the medium term, even for children. Young people are so attracted to it that we assume this is what they really want, but it’s not true. They are people too, and like us, they can tell when something is good enough to last — especially if we help them learn. Children may be drawn to these titles like candy, but just as we teach them to appreciate real food, we can teach them to appreciate beauty. 

Consider what a great illustrator does. Peter Spier’s books are beloved by children and contain page after page of extraordinarily detailed watercolor illustrations. In “Circus,” a nearly wordless book, he renders animals, people, and the activities under the big top with such warmth and precision that children can study them for hours. Or there’s Steven Kellogg, whose elaborate retellings of “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Pecos Bill” mix beautiful, sweeping landscapes with subtle humor and heroism. These books do not shout at children. They invite them in to draw them out; the illustrations inspire little readers to notice things so they can notice the rest of the world, too.  

3. Insist on substance 

Beyond garish books, there is a more insidious category: the merely mediocre or subtly damaging. These books aren’t “woke,” necessarily. They are simply empty, mindless, or crude. Take a look at the ubiquitous Scholastic Book Fair flyer that makes it home in kids’ backpacks each year and you’ll find “Super Diaper Baby: The Invasion of the Potty Snatchers,” “Gabby’s Dollhouse: Happy Cat-O-Ween!,” countless licensed characters intended to line corporate pockets, titles linked to Dude Perfect or other YouTube channels, and of course, Taylor Swift. 

Then there are the social-emotional learning books, thin attempts to instill the virtues that great children’s literature teaches. Todd Parr’s “It’s Okay to Be Different,” for example, delivers its simple, titular message with primitive illustrations in flat declarative sentences. Even young children yearn for realistic stories and lessons. Yet such books give children nothing to spur growth — no story, no conflict, no character who faces anything and must decide how to respond.

Books such as the immensely popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” have a more subversive problem. Its protagonist, Greg Heffley, navigates middle school by complaining, manipulating his friends, and rarely suffering real consequences for his selfishness. The prose is written well below the level of its target readers, and the drawings are scratchy and deliberately crude. Kids say the book is relatable, and it is — by mimicking the very characteristics parents spend years raising their children to overcome. 

4. Choose stories worth remembering

Children’s books don’t need art worthy of the Louvre or stories with the moral depth of “Crime and Punishment” to be valuable. But a truly great children’s book is beautiful, and it does draw young readers outside of themselves toward fuller understanding of the world and the people in it. 

Thankfully, parents and teachers don’t have to figure this all out alone. There are excellent resources like Sarah McKenzie’s “Read-Aloud Revival,” “The 1,000 Good Books List” by John Senior, and Hillsdale College’s Core Virtues website, a directory of classic children’s books to form the moral imagination. Check out Hillsdale’s free online Classic Children’s Literature course for a deeper study of a few great classics: “The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh,” “The Wind in the Willows,” “Treasure Island,” and others. 

You could read your child “The Little House” by Virginia Lee Burton, which follows a country cottage swallowed up by urbanization before getting rescued and moved back to the country. The book captivates little readers with its striking illustrations and approachable warmth while contending with profound issues such as the cost of progress and what it means to belong. 

Or there’s Jill Barklem’s “Brambly Hedge” series, which follows a community of mice living in an English hedgerow through the turning of the seasons. Children come for the charming mice. They stay because the books quietly celebrate what’s most worth loving about the world: community, home, the rhythms of nature, and the beauty of small things tended with care. 

Ultimately, a great children’s book is easy to spot, though difficult to produce. It is something beautiful, simple, and profound all at the same time — a story that confronts the questions, conundrums, trials, and joys of life in ways even the youngest can understand.

With that in mind, next time you’re choosing a book for your child, try a test: Read it first. Did you feel inspired? Did you enjoy it yourself? If so, your child will too.

***

Kathleen O’Toole is the associate vice president for K-12 education at Hillsdale College and a high school teacher at Hillsdale Academy.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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