The puzzling rise in high-level science books for infants and toddlers.
If your idea of a perfect board book for people under the age of three is Sandra Boynton’s 1982 classic “Moo, Baa, La La La!,” you might be surprised to discover what’s passing for toddler literature these days. Forget the silly animal high jinks, the humble slapstick of peekaboo and patty-cake, and the earnest overviews of shapes, colors, and numbers; some of today’s baby books have far loftier ambitions. A sampling of titles from the past decade: “Bath Time Physics,” “General Relativity for Babies,” “Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering!,” “Baby Loves Thermodynamics!,” “Baby Loves Quarks!”
Open the sturdy turquoise cover of Ruth Spiro’s “Baby Loves Coding!,” illustrated by Irene Chan, and you might be lulled into thinking that this is, indeed, a book for very young children. It’s small (about seven inches square), short (only ten spreads), made of chunky cardboard, and full of bright colors. It starts off promisingly, with a smiling toy train rolling toward a bobbleheaded, pink-cheeked baby. The text reads:
Even the publishers seem to realize that all this might be a bit much. The Penguin Random House web page for Spiro’s board books begins, “With tongue firmly in cheek, the Baby Loves Science series introduces highly intellectual science concepts to the littlest learners.” Do babies understand “tongue in cheek”? Even if they do, there’s nothing particularly funny about these books (unless you count Chan’s illustrations of insouciant babies cheerfully absorbing scientific concepts that might mystify a graduate student). Still, at least Spiro’s board books offer the hint of a story, many of them starting with a baby in a familiar setting—a bedroom, a playground, a park—who encounters something in his or her everyday world (for example, a bird) that sparks a treatise on a complex scientific topic (aerospace engineering). Ferrie’s “Baby University” books pay no lip service to character or plot. They contain mini-lectures for babies, with lines like “Mass warps space” and “The forward force is called thrust.”
There’s a mind-numbing, pedantic quality to this language. The brainiest baby books attempt to explain complex scientific concepts—do you know what a quark is? I didn’t, until I read the relevant baby book—in the span of a few pages, with no effort to use words that a toddler would understand. Even a verifiable baby genius couldn’t make sense of lines such as “Protons and neutrons stick together to make a nucleus,” and “The center of a black hole is called a singularity,” and “Air trapped inside a bubble rushes out through a spot made weak by evaporation.” Yet, in the decade or so since STEM-focussed board books first began appearing on the scene, Spiro’s series has sold more than a million copies, and Ferrie’s more than four million. What are we to make of this trend?
Alana Bennison, a children’s librarian at the C. H. Booth Library, in Newtown, Connecticut, credits the books’ popularity to the same parental anxiety that fuelled the Baby Einstein craze in the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands. “Parents want to give their children a leg up,” she told me. “They feel tremendous pressure.” The multimedia Baby Einstein franchise, launched, in 1996, by a former high-school English and art teacher who had recently had her first child, included videocassettes, DVDs, flash cards, toys, and board books designed to educate infants and toddlers by immersing them in classical music, major works of art, and words from seven different languages.
By the time it was acquired by the Walt Disney Company, in 2001, Baby Einstein was generating more than seventeen million dollars a year in sales, and over the next few years that number grew to a whopping two hundred million dollars a year. But then Disney started to get hit with complaints, as parents discovered that Baby Einstein had failed to turn their babies into Einsteins. Alarmingly, a 2007 study in The Journal of Pediatrics had found that, for each hour per day spent watching so-called educational baby videos, infants understood, on average, six to eight words fewer than infants who did not watch them—a testament to the essential role of social interaction in early learning. In 2009, after the advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood threatened a class-action lawsuit over deceptive marketing claims, Disney began offering every household a refund for up to four Baby Einstein DVDs.
If the Baby Einstein products were meant to introduce babies to high culture, from the music of Beethoven and Mozart to the art of da Vinci and van Gogh, many of the STEM board books seem to have more worldly goals. Babies learning about coding and structural engineering are babies getting ready to work.
When I spoke with Peg Oliveira, the director of the Gesell Program in Early Childhood at the Yale Child Study Center, she called these books “a PowerPoint presentation dressed up as a board book.” But Oliveira thinks their deficiencies go beyond that. “The whole goal of board books is to build preliteracy skills,” she said, “introducing babies and toddlers to the idea that books are fun and reading is pleasurable. What do babies learn from a board book about electromagnetics? That books are boring and reading is hard.”
“We expect children to clear academic hurdles at younger and younger ages—counting by preschool, reading by kindergarten,” Oliveira went on. And now, apparently, quantum physics by toddlerhood. The capabilities that children require to succeed in the world are both more basic and more sophisticated than what these books offer: things like problem-solving, curiosity, creativity, and perseverance.
As Oliveira described it, reading with babies is a process of “serve and return, like in a game of tennis: the parent offers something and the child responds, keeping the game going.” When thinking about material for children, she said, “You want to ask, Does it meet the developmental needs of the child now, and does it support them in trying out the next stage of development?” Does it push the child to grow? “We learn like going up stairs,” she said. “We need some help, some stability before we take the next step.” This framework for early literacy underscores why it’s so important for board books to offer familiar language and simple story lines. During the crucial period before the age of three, infants and toddlers are building the skills that will eventually turn them into readers: first, they learn to understand individual words, then to recite lines from their favorite books, then to grasp the rudiments of stories and to create their own.
To Oliveira, a good board book has “words that are fun in your mouth”—a text bolstered by rhyme, rhythm, and repetition—along with bright, high-contrast pictures of things a baby can name. By these metrics, board books that shine include Bruce Degen’s “Jamberry,” Margaret Wise Brown’s “Goodnight Moon,” and the entire Sandra Boynton œuvre. It seems almost unfair to compare lines like “Quickberry! Quackberry! Pick me a blackberry!”(from “Jamberry”) and “Rhinoceroses SNORT and SNUFF and little dogs go RUFF RUFF RUFF!” (from “Moo, Baa, La La La”) with the eye-glazing statement “Everything in the world is made of atoms and molecules” (from “Baby Loves Quarks!”).
Infants and toddlers are unique end users, since they can’t choose, buy, or rate the product themselves. But reports from parents and caregivers can give us an idea. Another librarian I met, Nora Reilly, of Sandy Hook, Connecticut, purchased several Spiro books for her grandson. “He liked them when he was about nine months old,” she said. “I think he was attracted to the illustrations of the baby’s faces, especially the eyes. But, after he turned one, the books didn’t hold his attention.” In other words, at just the age when a child can recognize familiar objects based on the words being read aloud, the science jargon made the books inaccessible: their language became a barrier rather than a gateway to understanding.
Kate Sheblak, a parent of a twenty-month-old in Green Bay, Wisconsin, owns five of the “Baby Loves Science” titles. The enthusiasm that her daughter, Elliot, showed for the books peaked at around twelve to fifteen months, Sheblak told me, but she saw more value in the series than Reilly did. “Elliott liked the simple illustrations,” she said. “The thermodynamics one has a kitty, baby, and sun that she could point to and name.” Both Sheblak and her husband have technical backgrounds, and they found that “some of the analogies the books use don’t make a ton of sense.” Still, she added, “My mom was very big on ‘You can’t read too many books to a baby.’ ”
As long as these STEM board books occupy just one sliver of a baby’s home library, it’s hard to argue with that wisdom. And, if the books get tech-oriented parents into the habit of reading to their kids, so much the better. Between 2008 and 2024, the number of computer-science majors in the U.S. rose fivefold, a trend that suggests a similarly sharp rise in the number of young parents with tech degrees. Maybe, to these parents, a baby book on coding is more than just a bedtime aid: it allows them to share something they love with someone they love. From that angle, Oliveira doesn’t dispute the books’ value. “If these books keep parents in the game of reading,” she said, “let’s not fault them for that.” ♦
