Growing up has become associated with outgrowing certain pleasures: picture books, fairy tales, stories that speak openly about wonder and fear, villains and heroes. But adulthood does not actually require abandoning the things that first shaped how we experience the world. Recently, Anna Holmes wrote about moving across the country in 2020 and donating boxes of adult literary classics but refusing to part with the children's books she owned. Those stories were not just sentimental objects; they preserved a way of engaging with the world that adulthood often trains out of us. The children's author Mac Barnett argues that 'when we dismiss children's books, what we're really doing is failing to recognize the potential of children.' Holmes extends the thought: 'In dismissing children's books, adults fail to recognize the potential of people.' Children approach stories with a flexibility that many adults lose: They tolerate nonsense and accept strange rules, as long as the story can...
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