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:
So far, so good. But, over the next few pages, as Baby walks from rug to toy box, we hurtle into strange new territory:
This pattern of stepsis called an algorithm.
The train follows an algorithm, too.A tiny computer tells the trainwhat to do.
A programmer writes an algorithmin a language the computercan understand.
The language is called code.The computer reads the code andfollows the steps in the algorithm.
Lately, these tech-oriented books for infants and toddlers seem to be everywhere. The twenty-six books in Spiro’s “Baby Loves Science” series are rivalled by Chris Ferrie’s extensive “Baby University” collection, with such winning titles as “Electromagnetism for Babies,” “Quantum Computing for Babies” (co-authored by William Hurley), and “Robotics for Babies” (co-authored by Sarah Kaiser). And let’s not forget the “Big Science for Tiny Tots” series, from MIT Kids Press, featuring “High Chair Chemistry” and “Playtime Engineering.” In a manic burst of science geekery, there are even special holiday versions of Spiro’s “Baby Loves Science” books, though you might have trouble getting past the word-salad titles: “Baby Loves Angular Momentum on Hanukkah!” and “Baby Loves Photosynthesis on St. Patrick’s Day!.”
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.
