Emotion in the translation of children’s literature is of vital importance to child readers’ emotional perception of the translated works and children’s emotional development. We propose that the cognitive equivalence of emotion in the translation of children’s literature includes the effective transmission of emotional texture, emotional intensity and emotional aesthetics. The three complement each other and together constitute the system of emotional cognitive equivalence. In the face of the challenge of emotional translation of children’s literature, the translator needs to judge the degree and change of the original emotion by tracing back to the emotional vocabulary of the source text, and restore the aesthetic characteristics of the original image beauty and phonetic beauty, so as to promote the cognitive schema of the text emotion among the original author, the translator and the reader to achieve the fusion of horizons, and to convey the emotional texture, intensity and aesthetic characteristics of the source text to the greatest extent, so as to finally realize the emotional equivalence in the translation of children’s literature.