Whether you’re squeezing in an end-of-summer road trip, need a new listen for your kids’ quiet time in the afternoon, or just want something to play in the car to keep everyone calm and cheerful in the back seat, audiobooks are an under-rated parenting hack for all occasions.
My kids greatly enjoy audiobooks and listen to at least a chapter or two from one almost every day. At that rate, it can be hard to keep up with their pace and find enough new audiobooks for them! On top of that, I’m picky about what they read and listen to; I believe that the stories we hear help to form our characters, so I try to choose their listening material carefully.
Here are some of our favorites.
- The Boxcar Children series
- The Magic Treehouse series
- The Paddington Bear series
- The Winnie-the-Pooh series
- The Little House in the Big Woods series
- The Chronicles of Narnia series
- All-of-a-Kind Family
- The Flat Stanley collection
- The Frog and Toad collection
- My Father’s Dragon (and its sequels)
- The Thomas the Tank Engine Railway Series Story Collection
- The Melendy Family Series
- Homer Price and the Centerburg Tales
- The Hobbit
- The Henry Huggins series
- The Anne of Green Gables series
- Charlotte’s Web
- The Penderwicks Series
- The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Series
- The Beatrix Potter collection
- The Redwall Series
- The Little Women series
- The Chronicles of Prydain
- The Lord of the Rings
- James Herriot’s Treasury for Children
- Mr. Popper’s Penguins
- The Moffats Series
- The Wind in the Willows
- Thornton Burgess’ Animal Books Series
- The Greathall Products of the Classics, narrated by Jim Weiss (King Arthur and His Knights, Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, etc.)
- The Maestro Classics Series (our favorite is The Nutcracker)
- The Classical Kids Series (especially Mozart’s Magic Fantasy)
- Peter and the Star-Catchers
- A to Z Mysteries
Add your own favorite audiobooks for kids in the comments below. And happy listening!