Highlights Magazine has reached millions of kids over 80 years — straight from the Poconos

Honesdale, Pa. — In waiting rooms all over America, millions of children found something to stave off the impending needles and drills, a magical world of puzzles, games, and stories written just for them.

For many kids, Highlights was the first magazine they ever read and, perhaps, the one that mattered most when they look back on their childhood, decades later.

In an era when print circulation — magazines, newspapers, or even the phone book — steadily declines, it’s easy to look back on Highlights, which was first published in 1946, with a glowing nostalgia. Every issue was full of intricately-illustrated hidden-picture puzzles, the beloved duo of Goofus and Gallant making disparate decisions, and child-authored “Dear Highlights” questions that were often silly, serious, and tender.

“I let my friends borrow one of my stuffed animals. She’s going to give it back next time we meet, but I’m afraid she’s going to lose it,” a girl named Ramona, from California, wrote to Highlights.

The magazine may get some Gen X’ers feeling wistful, but Highlights and its handful of offshoots are alive and well and, perhaps, more crucial than ever in an era where children’s attention spans are pulled in every direction. Highlights turns 80 this year, and its editorial offices remain in a cozy pre-Civil War, Italianate house in downtown Honesdale, Wayne County.

“We are as relevant as we were 80 years ago,” said Marlo Scrimizzi, senior editorial director for Highlights for Children. “Our future is expansion. We want to bring Highlights to more homes and families.”

Today, Highlights for Children publishes six magazines, with a combined circulation of one million a month, all while remaining family-owned. It’s still full of old favorites, like Goofus and Gallant, plus dinosaurs, outer space themes, animals, and unicorns, the mythical beast that’s made a big comeback in recent years.

“Dinosaurs will always be in,” Scrimizzi said.

Outside of the flagship magazine, which targets 6 to 12 year olds, the company publishes Hello (ages 0-2), Highlights CoComelon (ages 1-4), High Five (ages 2-6), High Five Bilingüe (ages 2-6), and brainPLAY (ages 7 & up).

On a recent January afternoon in Honesdale, the editorial crew was laying out its latest issue, which featured a Japanese artist who practices kintsugi, the art of repairing broken objects by filling cracks with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.

In the 1940s, a husband and wife duo from Pennsylvania, Garry Cleveland Myers and Caroline Clark Myers, made an unlikely decision to create a magazine focused on and for children, with the motto “Fun with a purpose.” Garry Cleveland Myers had a PhD in psychology from Columbia, and Caroline Clark Myers was a schoolteacher in Wayne County.

“They really wanted kids to know that they had it in themselves to be creative, to think through problems, to be empowered and have the confidence to really come up with the creative solutions and think through answers to questions,” said Judy Burke, the magazine’s editor.

The Myerses, who had worked for another children’s magazine before starting their own, had a groundswell of support from parents and built a clientele base from old-fashioned door-knocking. By 1950, however, the business model was lagging.

“They were editors, not business people, really. They were educators,” Burke said. “They were in really dire straits, financially, and almost had to close, so they kind of rally some troops.”

The business didn’t fully take off, however, until their son Garry Myers Jr. quit his job as an aeronautical engineer and took a look at the books. It was Myers Jr. who decided to send the magazine to doctors’ and dentists’ offices, which sparked a rush of subscriptions from parents.

By 1960, Highlights had a half-million subscribers, and the relationship between the magazine and the waiting room was forever sealed.

“Parents would see their kids amusing themselves with this magazine in the waiting room and think, ‘What is this product?’” Burke said. “There wasn’t a ton of magazines for kids back then.”

Dipesh Navsaria, professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin, said the competition for children’s attention extends to the waiting room in 2026. Some have arcade games. Others have televisions. Every parent has a phone, he said, which is an easy salve for a sick child.

Still, as a supporter of Highlights, he believes the timeless magazine still matters there.

“Families should expect and perceive that the most important thing we care about is that child’s health and well-being. That extends to what’s on the walls, in the exam rooms, and the waiting room,” he said. “With Highlights, there’s a long history of trust. Highlights doesn’t have advertising, and parents can know their kids aren’t going to be marketed to.”

Burke was one of those kids in the waiting room, reading Highlights at a doctor’s appointment 20 miles west of Honesdale.

“I’d see how much of the magazine I could read before they called me in,” she said. “I didn’t want to miss a page.”

Decades later, Burke was in a Pennsylvania dentist’s office during a break from college and picked up Highlights again. That inspired her to reach out to the company, and now she’s been there for 31 years.

“A girl wrote in recently and said, ‘I love your magazine so much, I just feel like I could curl up with it’,” Burke said. “Those words warm my heart.”

Honesdale’s seen an uptick in population and tourism, along with more breweries, artists, restaurants, and short-term rentals moving into the once sleepy Poconos town, and Burke, Scrimizzi, and a small crew anchor the Honesdale editorial office are in the middle of it all, downtown. Other editorial workers work remotely, and the company’s business offices are in Ohio.

The Honesdale office isn’t a location of an amusement park, but there’s a large dinosaur head in a meeting area, vintage children’s books that the Myereses wrote for, along with other children’s memorabilia.

Burke’s office is filled with monster puppets, and just outside it, on a wall, is a large wooden motif of the magazine that a fan built, a testament to how beloved it is.

Along the staircase, Highlights’s guiding principle is affixed to the wall: “Children are the most important people in the world.”