Give Your Kids Good Stories

by Wes Callihan, (Antithesis, July/August 1991, p. 3)

Do you enjoy what you read to your children?

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is
not equally (and far more) worth reading at the age of fifty.” If C.S. Lewis
was right about this, then a good test of the quality of a given “children’s”
book should be whether or not adults can (not whether they do) enjoy it
as well. To put it another way, if it is only a children’s book, it is
probably not a good children’s book.

He’s right, of course. Consider those books that are called
children’s classics. Peter Rabbit is considered a classic. So is Winnie
the Pooh. So are many fairy tales, and so also (though for different
reasons) are the Little House books. Children love these stories—but the
same is true of the adults who read them to the children. Something in them
goes deeply enough into a person to obviate the question of age. A child may be
delighted in a story in different ways than the adult who is reading the same
story, but it would be surprising if those elements of poetry and romance (yes,
Beatrix Potter!) that delight the adult did not also delight the child, not
because of some remnant of the child in the adult, but rather because of the
human in both.

On the other hand, there is a class of books written
specifically for young people which is nearly impossible for adults to enjoy.
Nor should it be said that we shouldn’t try to enjoy them because they are written
for young people. That would be a great mistake. These are the teen series of
pulp or school book club variety wherein some teenager “learns about life”
through an adventure (in boy’s books) or a relationship (in girl’s books). In
these books, most of the elements that make the children’s books so delightful
are lost. The supernatural, the world of faerie, talking animals—all are gone.
Some might respond, “All good riddance, too! Escapism is alright for children,
but young people need to learn about the real world.” This response shows how
badly literary fantasy and the purpose of stories in general is misunderstood—and
what assumptions lurk behind such a remark about “reality”?

Something else is gone, too. In the best books, children are
taken seriously as people—young, yes, but people nonetheless. In the other
kind, they are talked down to in the attempt to give them “their own
literature.” If they have their own, and we have ours, how will they make the
transition? How do children’s minds become adult minds? What is the
essential difference between the best children’s books and the best adult
books? It is not a difference of kind.