Why Are Adults Reading Their Favorite Children’s Book ?

When the pandemic hit us, most of us treated the quarantine as a summer camp or a productivity workshop for the first few months. Some set new goals, some baked a lot, and some learned new languages. However, the longer the pandemic stays, people realize that they’re not in control of how their future plays out anymore. We’re all trapped in the situation, stuck at our homes, unsure when the pandemic will end. With those thoughts on our minds, we tend to reach out for objects that can give us comfort, that’s why some play Animal Crossing, and some reach out for their old books, as Salon details:

When prompted, everyone I asked said that the main appeal of revisiting these books was found in knowing how the story was going to end, even when everything around us still feels so uncertain.

"Trauma takes away our gray areas. It divides our timeline into a before and an after," Dr. Valentina Stoycheva, an author and clinical psychologist specializing in traumatic stress, told the New York Times. "And while it has the danger of creating this longing for the before, when things were maybe safer, and when we were unaware of all of this and protected by our naïveté, there's also something about nostalgic behaviors — fashion, clothes, movies, music — that serve as a transitional object."

Those transitional objects — much like a baby's blanket or favorite stuffed animal — can help people through life changes and in navigating specific stressors by providing more outlets for self-soothing, Stoycheva told the Times.

Bradley gave me the example of how she used to carry a battered, coffee-stained copy of "Where the Wild Things Are" in her purse when she would travel via airplane. She was afraid of flying, and a quote from the book — "there should be a place where only the things you want to happen, happen" — always calms her.

"The feeling of nostalgia is kind of hard to put into words," Bradley said. "But I know when I pull out that book, I'm immediately transported back to a time when I felt safe and it felt like there was so much still left to discover. It keeps me from becoming jaded."