I started working for Cardus, a Canadian social and public policy think tank, and the publisher of Comment, in June 2017. At the time, my wife was pregnant with our second daughter, Ava. A week or two after Ava was born, we received a large box in the mail. It was full of brand-new children’s books, a gift for my wife and me to read to our children. Each of my colleagues had selected a favourite book for our family. These joined our growing collection, which included many books from my childhood and that of my wife, books we received as gifts from family, and books purchased during visits to the local thrift store. I’d guess there are over five hundred children’s books in our collection now, and they’ve been well used. When our children were young, we read to them daily, and even now we enjoy reading chapter books together. Our girls cut their teeth on these books when they were learning to read, gradually reading books of greater complexity. Our children’s-book collection stands as the emblem of a beautiful time in the life of our family. 

Children’s books are not inferior to any other forms of writing. Any parent who has witnessed how a book can captivate the attention of a young child—or who has been captivated themselves—can attest to that. Invariably, children have a prerogative to choose the books they like best for their nightly story times, which leads to parents reading the same stories over and over again. Like listening to a favourite album, frequent repetition leads to a warm appreciation for the subtleties of character, plot points, and illustrations. For this reason, an interest in high-quality children’s books is better for everyone involved. Certainly, we can be grateful for the many children’s-book authors and illustrators who take their work seriously enough to dedicate themselves to it fully. In one of our family’s favourites, The Gruffalo, written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Alex Scheffler, a small mouse outwits an entire forest of animals as well as a monster whose name is a portmanteau of the words “gruff” and “buffalo”—a hybrid creature with various fearsome features who proves not to be as scary as the rumours made him out to be. And in another, author-illustrator Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings, rushing commuters are forced to pause in a contemplative moment while a mother duck leads her ducklings through busy downtown streets to their home. 

— 

As a discipline, aesthetics encapsulates a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art. Children’s books have an aesthetic quality, and reading a children’s book is, at least in part, an aesthetic experience. Yet, as I was reminded in a recent sermon, God’s creatures have always had a precarious relationship with aesthetics. We observe this in Scripture. Whether it is when Eve sees that the fruit is “a delight to the eyes” in Genesis 3:6 or when the “sons of God [see] that the daughters of man [are] attractive” in Genesis 6:2, aesthetic delight appears to be construed as a deception that leads away from God. The aesthetic awareness represented in these passages seems hard-baked not only into the origins of sin but into the very distinction between those who “find favour” with God and those who do not. The favour that Noah finds with God is “in the eyes of the Lord,” suggesting that, unlike humans, God’s eyes delight in and are attracted to righteousness. This may be why the Reformed tradition, of which I am a part, imbues aesthetics with a sense of God-breathed conditionality that humans must respond to. 

Calvin Seerveld describes God’s demands on our aesthetic existence in terms of “aesthetic obedience,” which introduces a degree of fidelity into something that is typically understood as a matter of subjective taste. Aesthetic obedience should be understood as an expression of obedience to God even in one’s response to and appreciation of beauty. The idea that we are accountable to God in the aesthetic mode not only allows for the identification of ideological tendencies in our own preferences and tastes but also militates against idolatry. Whether that pertains to elevating particular aesthetic realities or raising up particular artists or works of art for uncritical approval, the appreciation of art involves a degree of responsibility. This is why children’s books ought to be selected with care, and why parents and others involved in reading children’s books ought to have some criteria for judging the quality of the books that are selected. In his essay “Poetry and the Reformed Tradition,” a chapter in Reformed Public Theology, James K.A. Smith lays out an argument for why children’s books may be understood as the paradigm of Reformed aesthetics. (Actually, he argues this for poetry, but I think it applies just as well to children’s books.) Smith contends that aesthetic appreciation and enjoyment ought to be close at hand, identifying five principles of Reformed aesthetics: (1) we “affirm the significance of the aesthetic . . . as its own good”; (2) “the aesthetic activates our imaginations by means of . . . ‘allusivity’”—“a disciplined suggestiveness”; (3) “the aesthetic is not merely characteristic of fine art or professional artworks narrowly construed,” but “there is an aesthetic element to all human life”; (4) “a Reformed aesthetic hallows the quotidian”; and (5) “aesthetics in the Reformed tradition resists any monolithic or myopic understanding of art.” 

Life is impoverished when aesthetics becomes a luxury, reserved for special occasions. When aesthetics becomes the concern only of fine art and professional artists, we lose the ability to recognize, appreciate, and evaluate the aesthetic aspect in other realms of life. The everyday enjoyment of children’s books confirms that the aesthetic is a fundamental aspect of creation, not just decoration or a beautiful way to communicate or convey important “messages.” The kinds of poetry and pictures that can be found in children’s books heighten the sensory aspect of human experience, opening us up to allusion and nuance. By becoming more aware of imaginative possibilities within the world around them, parents and their children learn, laugh, and wonder at new dimensions in language and relationships. They are especially blessed when through children’s books they witness concrete connections between the ordinary details of human life and the realm of the eternal. 

— 

Too often we imagine anyone can write a good children’s book. In fact, as a genre, children’s books are incredibly difficult to pull off. While the Newbery Medal and the Caldecott Medal are awarded to the children’s books that most successfully appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of children, the joy of reading a new children’s book aloud to your child reflects the reality that the best children’s books are designed to be enjoyed together. There is no better way to appreciate the qualities specific to good children’s literature: rhyme, rhythm, pattern, and verse; engaging illustrations and earthy, indelicate jokes; surprising plot twists and satisfying resolutions. At the same time, part of the beauty in children’s books consists of the degree to which parents “know” on a different level than their children. 

In Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type, written by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Betsy Lewin, parents enjoy a winking subtext in which barnyard animals unionize for better worker benefits, while children laugh at the sounds (“click, clack, moo” is the sound of the cows typing up their list of demands) and at the farmer’s growing realization that he has been outsmarted. This dual knowing registers as a kind of playfulness evident in Dorothy Aldis’s poem “Hiding,” written in 1920: 

Now this poem is funny, not least because both Benny and his parents seem to be in on the joke. The poem plays at their feigned difficulty in finding Benny and their joy in prolonging the game. As readers, the joy that Benny feels when his mother finally gives up the search seems well earned, and not only because his parents couldn’t find him. Benny needs to play the game too, and since the poem is written from his perspective, the reader understands that his parents’ surprise upon finding him confirms (to his mind) that he has stumped them by hiding well—well enough for him to have agency in bringing their fruitless search to an end. Benny’s parents actively encourage his sense of playfulness, for their mutual pleasure. 

Children’s books are designed to facilitate these kinds of connections amid different kinds of knowing. Story, words, and pictures weave an immersive world that can be explored together. Repetition and pattern, rhyme and alliteration, nonsense and portmanteau words, and hyperbole and exaggeration delight both child and adult. The ladybird books by Julia Donaldson allow for the recitation of a refrain, listing all the barnyard animals and their sounds, leading to the sure sense that they are unified in their opposition to Hefty Hugh and Lanky Len, a pair of opportunistic robbers. Nanette’s Baguette, a book by Mo Willems, explores the many permutations of words that rhyme with “baguette,” teaching children that a fondness for good French bread is generational. Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast sets up an improbable scenario for breakfast royalty by describing a race through the fridge for the last drops of maple syrup—in rhyming couplet. Richard Scarry’s classic books describe a world where cars and trucks are shaped like hot dogs, carrots, pencils, and cucumbers. Who does not want to share such worlds with those they love? 

— 

The aesthetics of reading children’s books is not based on sentimentality. Over the years I began noticing inscriptions in the books we had, many of which were purchased from the thrift store. 

I wasn’t always sure what to make of these heartfelt inscriptions, remembrances of times long past and clearly forgotten. Something had inspired people to give these books to these children as an expression of love. But the books had been discarded, sent to the thrift store for others to enjoy. Perhaps there are stories of loss and heartbreak behind such castoffs. But it could also mean that the pretext and the occasion are not what matter. Something else prompted these gifts. Could it be that the experience of reading a book aloud to a child has value in its own right, one that remains even when the physical book is gone? 

Thinking back to the practice of selecting books for new parents at Cardus, I am convinced this must be true. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of picking my favourite books for colleagues as well. I’ve often chosen books by Robert McCloskey, who situated many of his stories on the East Coast. With their timeless stories and superb illustrations, Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal, and One Morning in Maine are all classics. Visiting the Make Way for Ducklings sculpture in the Public Garden is obligatory for anyone who finds themselves in Boston. The list of East Coast authors also includes Dahlov Ipcar and Eric Carle, both of whom wrote and illustrated their own books. Some of Ipcar’s books about farm life, barnyard animals, and the Atlantic fisheries were favourites of my wife when she was a child. And Carle’s book about the metamorphosis of a very hungry caterpillar was a favourite of our children. In 2021, upon reading Carle’s obituary, I learned that he was involved in establishing a museum of children’s-book art in Amherst, Massachusetts, and so it became a destination for our family on our way back from visiting family near Boston. 

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is a rare thing in North America: a museum, as the name implies, dedicated to exhibiting the art of children’s books. Set in a rural location near Hampshire College, the Eric Carle Museum is in the same town as the Emily Dickinson Museum, Dickinson also being from Amherst. I had a sense of deep time in that place. At the Eric Carle Museum, one gallery featured a collection of children’s-book art depicting horses. Another gallery featured art made by Carle in collaboration with a Japanese artist, Kazuo Iwamura, with whom he had written a book—one wrote from the beginning, one from the end, and their stories met in the middle. In the theatre, we watched a funny cartoon, based on a children’s book I had not read before, about a man reluctantly visiting the dentist. We spent time reading children’s books in the library and made tissue-paper collages and ink drawings in the art centre. We bought books, prints, a T-shirt, and toys at the gift shop. Like children’s books themselves, it was a museum of simple pleasures to be enjoyed by parents and children together. We learned there are more than thirty such museums of picture-book art in Japan. Why are there comparatively few such museums in North America? 

My hunch is that we don’t recognize or appreciate the aesthetic pleasure of reading books with our children. Perhaps we recognize it sentimentally, as the occasion for a heartfelt gift. But there is little time in today’s culture, saturated as it is with screens and busy schedules, for the simple experience of enjoying a good book together. Maybe part of the problem is that we don’t know where to look for good children’s books, ones that facilitate the kind of experience I’ve been describing. It is worth the effort, though, to find books that you and your children will enjoy. Some home-schooling groups establish a common library of good books, recommending and sharing books among families. We got involved last year with the Read-Aloud Revival, which got our children reading books to us and came with a lot of great recommendations. Our school librarian has been a fantastic resource, and we frequently scour the shelves at the local thrift store. We’ve also been blessed to both give and receive wonderful books from family and friends. If you’re looking for ways to bring beauty into your life, you could do worse than a good children’s book. In the republic where Plato has banished the poets, perhaps the best thing you can do is read to your children.