There are so many lovely kids books. Ones you remember fondly from your own childhood—Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? There are newer ones that you’ve loved reading to your own kids—Dragons Love Tacos, I Want My Hat Back, High Five, and Go the Fck to Sleep. And then when kids get a little older, they are reading Captain Underpants, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and everything from Beverly Clearly.
These books are fun. They make your kids laugh. They bring you together. They teach them the basics of a skill you hope to take with them into adulthood (that is, reading). These books are also, unfortunately, mostly nonsense. Again—by design. Kids books these days are designed to be fun and silly and surreal.
But it wasn’t always this way. Irene Vallejo explains in her must read (for curious adults, that is) book Papyrus: The Invention of Books In The Ancient World that in the ancient world, kids were not babied when it came to literature and language. As she writes,
Children were not introduced to reading with easy phrases such as “My mama loves me.” The educational method consisted of sudden immersion. Almost from the beginning, children were taken by the scruff of the neck and immersed in beautiful, difficult phrases by Euripides that they could barely understand (“Come to me sweet balm of sleep, comfort from my ills” or “Waste not fresh tears over old griefs”). Many fragments found were probably copies made by students.
It would have been a tougher go at first, certainly, but it paid off. She talks of generations of Greeks and Romans who fell in love with the music of the verses of the great texts. This didn’t just happen—it was an inculcation, almost an indoctrination. Literature—truly beautiful literature—was the sea that young men and women swam in and they carried their familiarity with these evocative and instructive texts with them for the rest of their lives.
Our kids deserve this too. They are not stupid. They can handle more than entertainment and silliness. In fact, they’re hungry for meaning, for beauty, for depth. So yes, read them the silly books. Laugh with them. But also enrich them with the good stuff. Give them language that sings, stories that stretch them, and ideas that stay with them long after you tuck them in good night.
P.S. You may want to check out The Daily Dad book (leather edition here) if you’re looking for practical advice and wisdom on how you can enrich your kids with the good stuff.
In fact, we titled the month of September in the book “Raise A Reader” because it’s full of relatable stories and lessons in learning, curiosity, and instilling a lifelong habit of reading in your children.
