I was ten or eleven when I first read Alice in Wonderland. I was sick in bed, feverish, and the used paperback copy my father had given me felt like a desperate choice. There on the cover was the Mad Hatter and a creepy bunny with a pocket watch. Still, I had nothing else to read. I was bored.

But by the time rebellious Alice had gone down the rabbit hole, I was far from bored. I raced through the story, in an altered reading state intensified by my illness. I remember the sweaty sweetness of my Indian-print bedspread, the delicious warmth under piles of blankets.

Just as my father bequeathed Alice to me, I'd love to do the same with my son. I can even picture the Hallmark scene: My little guy snuggles in my lap while I read aloud, as Alice shrinks to ten inches, then stretches out "'like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!'"

Except my nine-year-old doesn't like Alice. He prefers the Berenstain Bears.

While Alice meets a parade of tyrants and practical jokers in Wonderland, everyone is so nice in Bear Country it makes your teeth hurt. Brother and Sister Bear squabble, but they count their blessings. Mama Bear wears a mob cap and polka-dot muumuu, sprinkling words of wisdom at every turn.

My son Nick has always adored their antics. We own many BB titles, all chosen by him. When I first read Get the Gimmies—about combating the whinyness of little consumers—I was appalled at its moralizing tone. A few years on, I'm grateful to Stan and Jan Berenstain for a series that offers thinly disguised advice for kids.

That's my dilemma with children's books. The writer in me loves the edginess of Lewis Carroll. Martha the mom wants to please and instruct her child.

Children's literature has always included a strange amalgam of the subversive and the didactic. It's as hard to define as pretend tea in an invisible cup.

Part of the appeal is that books help you discover who you are. Our favorites are idiosyncratic. I liked Nancy Drew, but the Little House books left me cold. Now I watch the same process unfold for my son, and if some of his preferences don't thrill me—Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Teen Titans, The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Habit—they're his Wonderland.

Kids go for different kinds of books at different ages. Nick may one day pronounce Alice to be "awesome." He's currently obsessed with the Percy Jackson series, so much so that he turns out endless drawings of the Greek Gods, manga-style. But retellings of the actual myths? Those disturb him.

As we helicopterish parents worry about the "messages" entering the minds of our little ones—as if their gray matter can be imprinted like Silly Putty—we are probably missing the whole point. If we want our children to love books at least as much as the endless cartoons and apps that compete for their attention, then they need to make reading theirs.

That doesn't mean parents should give up. We don't have to keep our opinions to ourselves. We don't need to slink away, ceding the cultural ground to the onslaught of crud on display in a bookstore's "Young Adult" section or the Children's Room of the local library.

But maybe some of us well-intentioned and literary adults—okay, I mean me—need to remember that feverish feeling of reading under the covers, of diving into "adult" books that might have been forbidden by a watchful parent (or scorned, as in the case of my dad when he eyed a paperback by Jacqueline Susann), of discovering worlds inside ourselves.

Nick loves the Percy Jackson books so much that he's printed out a fan page for author Rick Riordan, complete with cover images of each title in the series. Nick first read all five Percy books on his own. Then he went through them again with me, as we read them aloud together.

Yesterday we finished The Last Olympian, the final volume—and I wanted to leap right into the next Riordan series. I have my own thing for Greek gods, but I wouldn't have chosen these books for Nick. He's the one who first brought them home from school.

While the Percy Jackson books are fun, period, there are many other children's titles that fall flat for anyone over the age of twelve. When it comes to kids, they like what they like—and it's often goofy stuff not intended for adults.

For example, Nick and my sister-in-law recently perused Extreme 3-D Scary Bugs, which he'd bought at a school book sale. Through the "enclosed glasses," they looked at a hideous photo of an ant taken with an electron microscope.

Said my sister-in-law: "You may be the first generation in history to see an ant's anus."

Nick exploded into giggles after I explained.

Scary Bugs is no literary gem. But is my son's fascination with extreme insects so different from little-girl me gawking with Alice at The Caterpillar? Maybe that's why we're so fond of our own childhood books. They'll always belong to us, not our parents.

This piece has been adapted from "Find Your Own Wonderland," an article that originally appeared in Talking Writing.

Alice in Wonderland was first published in 1865 as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) with illustrations by John Tenniel. These are now in the public domain, as is the other Alice image here by Peter Newell.

The drawing of Ares is by Nick and used by his permission.