Children's Books

I'm an unabashed lover of children's books. No kidding. Many times I'd much rather wander through the young readers section of the bookstore than prowl the stacks of current adult fiction. As a result, I made friends with Madeleine L'Engle's work years ago and discovered Kate DiCamillo (The Tiger Rising) one Colorado Christmas. Sadly, Madeleine passed away in 2007, but her books are consistently timely.

I've always been something of a late bloomer and when it comes to children's books, I think I'm a reverse bloomer. My mother taught me to read before kindergarten and by the time I was in elementary school, I wanted to read books that much older students found interesting. As a result, I somehow by-passed the stage where The Chronicles of Narnia or Madeleine's A Wind in the Door might have been just the thing. I was in graduate school when I picked up The Hobbit for the first time.

There are distinct advantages to reading children's literature as an adult. For one thing, we're able to understand metaphor and symbol in ways that simply escape us as children. The average person is unable to think in terms of abstractions until at least age 12 and frequently 13 or older. Even in adulthood, some individuals tend to think "concretely," demonstrated by their inability to interpret simple proverbs like, "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." A concrete thinker will say, "If you throw rocks in the house, you'll break the windows."

Sometimes parents can become impatient with younger children who don't seem to understand what we're saying. It's not because they're recalcitrant or spoiled, it's simply because they haven't matured sufficiently, in terms of plain old brain cells, to follow our meaning. Concrete thinking, however, is a core element in comedy and the classic duo, Abbott and Costello, were its masters. Do a web search sometime for the YouTube clip of their famous sketch, "Who's On First," and you'll see what I mean.

So, now as an adult, it's possible to read the classics of childhood as well as those destined to become classics, and see ourselves in new ways. A favorite author has written, "I am frequently blind to the very things that make for my own peace." Under pressure to "hurry up and relax" we miss the whole point. Visiting the writers of childhood takes us out of the world as we know it and allows us to see it with younger eyes. Seeing life with younger eyes...I hope we never outgrow it.