March 2 is Dr. Seuss’s birthday and Read Across America Day. Children will hear a lot of encouragement to read, but few will be given guidance on how to find worthwhile books.

March 2 is Dr. Seuss’s birthday, as well as “Read Across America” Day. Young children in schools across the country will hear a lot of encouragement to read books, but few will be given guidance on how to find the worthwhile ones or recognize the equivalent of literary dust bunnies. Many, in fact, will probably be handed volumes that are plain-out terrible. This is unfair to kids.

Some adults get very angry at people who claim that not all books are worthwhile. However, just imagine how infuriating it would be if reading material for adults were selected in the same way many of us choose books for kids.

If you fought too much with your wife, your mother-in-law would give you a novel about a husband who spends the first three-quarters of the story shouting and swearing at his bride until he experiences an epiphany and remodels his behavior. The illustrations would be colorful but rather ugly.

If you enjoyed a book that happened to feature dogs, your wife would go to the library and check out seven more titles about dogs and insist you try them all because they are also about dogs. Several would be written in rhyming verse that does not scan. You would also have an English teacher who assigned poems about depression and asked you to analyze the reason the poet chose each piece of punctuation.

No adult deserves this kind of treatment. Neither does any child in America. Would we harass them to “eat food!” or “say stuff!” with the same indiscriminate enthusiasm? Presumably not.

Yet human beings do need books. The question of which books children should read is hugely important. C. S. Lewis argued that we should cultivate “fertile and generous” emotions. That is, human beings need to be taught to feel love for what is good and beautiful and to feel distaste for what is bad.

Our affections must be ordered correctly if our intellects are going to have any chance at controlling our lazier, baser inclinations. Reading the right stories—both fiction and non-fiction—allows human beings to witness the richness of yearning for goodness, truth, and beauty. In other words, good books teach us to love the right things.

This principle is true even for the youngest readers. The picture books we pull out before bedtime are shaping our children’s outlook and affections. They are also already influencing the likelihood that our children will be intellectually and emotionally prepared to read great literature as they grow up.

We Need to Invest in Home Libraries

Instead of simply and indiscriminately telling kids to “read,” parents can do something much better. We can offer our children truly beautiful books by building family libraries. If we didn’t keep comfortable furniture in our homes, we would spend less time sitting there together. Similarly, when we make it easy to grab excellent books throughout the day, we communicate that reading is an expected and normal part of life.

Our collections need not be huge. We should be investing in books that are worth reading many times. It only makes sense to encourage re-reading by ensuring that our children aren’t overwhelmed by the distraction of excessive quantity. What matters is that the books we choose are morally, artistically, emotionally, and factually good.

The poetry should scan. The art should be top-notch. The language should be rich and well-chosen, filled with vocabulary that will expand our kids’ love for English. Non-fiction should bring its topic alive with a good narrative instead of training kids to expect factoids. These books are shaping our children’s attention span, which means they shouldn’t all be quick and easy reads. In fact, some should probably be illustrated in black and white.

Acquiring books need not be hugely expensive. Second-hand stores and library sales are often rich treasure troves. Check out this wonderful site to look for sales in your area. Grandparents often want gift ideas, too, and may love buying classics they remember reading to you.

Selecting and curating my family’s personal library is one of my favorite pastimes. Actually, it’s a bit of an obsession; and my husband is never surprised when I ask to pop into Goodwill on our rare date nights so that I can check the book section. Once we are there, it takes me a while to shop, but fortunately he is a patient man.

At the end of this article, I list some picture books that sit on my family’s shelves. First, though, here are several categories of books I look for. They may sound pedantic, but I’m looking for books that address meaningful themes without being heavy-handed or preachy.

After all, goodness, truth, and beauty are real. They resonate with human beings of all ages. They make good stories.

Three Types of Stories Young Children Need

1. Children Need Stories about Happy, Functional Families

Adults benefit from reading about troubled individuals who find redemption. Children, however, are still forming their basic sense of what is normal. They need books that uphold the foundations of their moral world. Tales of warm, loving, functional, intact families witness to virtue as found in daily life.

A huge part of any child’s identity and sense of security is tied up with what it means to be their parents’ child. This is a good thing. Healthy human beings define themselves in part through relationships with family, neighbors, culture, country, and God; and small children learn about the entire list by beginning with “family.”

Even though our kids will soon realize just how flawed their parents really are, they still need to know that the concept of parenthood is good and true: a gift well worth trying to live out. It is the foundation of a functional society.

Unfortunately, mainstream values aren’t very good at supporting functional, intact families. This is reflected in the picture books that get published. I’m not talking merely about the books that attack traditional families in obvious ways—those are easy to avoid. Others teach hyper-individualism in a more subtle style.

They portray fictional families in which the children’s whims and desires clearly rule the home, the children are routinely wiser than the adults, and the children always find their own answers and sense of self without input from adults. I would rather communicate the idea that human beings learn from and serve each other, and that this is part of why families are a tremendous blessing; so I look for books in which children aren’t ruled by their whims.

2. Children Need Both Wisdom and Wonder Tales

American parents often use books to correct their children’s behavior. This might be fine if parents weren’t so literal-minded about it. I often hear, “My kid won’t go to bed/quarrels too much/hates spinach/won’t share/calls me names. Can anyone recommend a picture book about this?”

This is unhelpful. Research indicates that when kids read stories about relatable characters who fight before reconciling, the kids actually become more aggressive and quarrelsome. Well, duh. Children imitate the behavior they see, and the fighting is longer and more interesting than the newfound appreciation at the end.

This is where good old-fashioned wisdom tales come in. Until recent times, the characters who modeled vice and foolishness were never ones with whom children identify. They were pigs, wolves, geese, or foxes. They were intended to be laughed at and rejected right along with their bad choices. Often they got eaten up.

Wisdom tales and folktales are also filled with examples of patience, perseverance, cleverness, and kindness. Yet they are generally wry and tolerant instead of preachy. Some modern authors write in the spirit of older tales. Arnold Lobel, for instance, possessed a particular talent for portraying the well-intentioned foibles of anthropomorphized animals.

Wonder tales are also important. Kids need to imagine themselves as the maiden who saves her town from starvation, the knight who goes face-to-face with a dragon, or the sailor who navigates through any gale. They need to be reassured that reality is much bigger than the mundane and the material.

A wise parent who remarks, “I’m sure St. George wasn’t scared of eating spinach,” will probably experience much better success in altering her children’s behavior than the mom who hunts up a book about a kid who throws his spinach against the wall.

3. Children Need Stories about the Natural World

One of the perils of modern life is a disconnection from nature: i.e., from reality. The best cure is to spend plenty of time outdoors, to grow plants, and to take your children camping; but books help too. They encourage children to think more deeply about the world around them and to observe what they see in more accurate terms.

Many nature-themed picture books are illustrated as if every inch of wood and stream contain about 200 animals. These don’t give children realistic expectations about what they will find on a nature walk. I prefer stories that focus on one particular plant, animal, or topic and that encourage children to learn about it in-depth. My children seem to prefer this kind of book also.

The Books We Have At Our House

This isn’t a perfect list-to-end-all-lists. It’s influenced by my quirks and tastes, my children’s personalities, and the titles I happened to find at library sales. However, I’m ready to vouch for all these books as ones my family loves.

Board Books for Babies and Very Young Toddlers

I’m not a fan of reading board books to tiny babies. With my firstborn, it made me feel silly, because all he wanted to do was eat them. I’d rather read hymns, poems, or other high-quality adult material aloud. I enjoy it, and the baby hears some rich language.

However, between the ages of one and two, my kiddos begin to be interested in reading their board books. At first, we simply learn to turn the pages in the correct order while pointing to objects in the pictures. Slowly they become capable of listening to the story. My 24-month old gets a book before bed and has realized that it is in his best interest to spin the process out as long as possible.

Picture Books for Older Toddlers and Young Children

I’ve attempted to divide my list of picture books into two categories roughly based on age. Your child’s attention span will be the best guide, however. If your kids are clumsy at turning pages, you might want to get a few of these in board-book form so they can be enjoyed without supervision.

Picture Books for the Slightly Older (non-toddler) Child

Nature Books for Kids

We collect two main types of nature books. We look for story-like narratives that allow kids to learn about a particular topic in-depth, and we also keep nature guides around so that they can look up the creatures they find.