Books for babies and toddlers are pretty much all the same: cute drawings and simple sentences. On some level, they're all goofy and inane. There's no accounting for taste to be sure, but I am especially baffled why some of these books grow tiresome after two read-throughs, while you are delighted to see your toddler reach for certain books again and again. Eric Carle's books are all in the latter camp for me. The illustrations are beautiful, of course, but something about the stupidly simple prose and narrative just ineffably works. I'm grateful to him.
My wife has a masters in reading and language arts in early childhood education. Which means shes also a LOT better at reading to the kids than me.
What i never realized was that a LOT of these books, Eric Carles are in that camp, are using words chosen to teach kids basic language skills and sentence formation. The ones that dont really employ a lot of those learning mechanisms, seem to be the ones that we grow tired of quickly and hit the back of the stack.. Im sure Nostalgia is part of it too.
Dr. Suess is similar and very heavy on sounds/aliteration. But you would be surprised to know that many of his books actually use very few words. Like Green Eggs and Ham is like 50 pages of sentence after sentence but only uses like 50 words total or something like that (i could be wrong, its one of the most famous ones that like that).
Honestly when I read to my young kids, i would get tired of the same books over and over and would just kinda make up the story. Now that my kids are learning to actually read, I dont do that anymore.
My understanding is that Dr. Seuss & P.D. Eastman books (among others) were primarily intended to be read by kids learning to read, not to be read aloud by parents.
But I have personally found these books with extreme limited vocabulary to be much better read-aloud books for 2-year-olds than books for independent reading by 4–5 year-olds. More generally, many other graded readers are excellent read-aloud books. At age 2–3, my kids particularly enjoyed the Henry and Mudge books https://www.amazon.com/dp/1534427139, and everything by Arnold Lobel.
Bloomfield was one of the leading linguists of his era, and his book is very carefully structured to introduce only one new spelling–sound association per lesson, with the first half consisting of only regularly spelled words, so there is no possible confusion, with the full mishmash of irregular words only introduced after the reader is already fluent with regular spellings.
My son & I started working through it together for about 10–15 minutes per day when he was 3.5 years old, and it took about 8 months to get to the end, after which he could fluently read pretty much any material he could comprehend. As a not-quite-5 year-old he now happily independently reads books intended for 3rd–4th graders. (I’m not trying to suggest every kid should start on such a project at that age; every kid is different, and interests and attention span vary.)
Jim Keller (cpu designer): "I joke, like, I read books. And people think, 'Oh, you read books'. Well, no, I've read a couple of books a week, for [50] years."[1] Thought you might like.
There is some discussion of the differences in the two editions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466 as well as the reviews on Amazon. I am going to give the updated version a try.
That’s interesting. I had some credits on Amazon so I got the book. I’ll check it out and see about working with my 5yo this summer.
And that’s pretty amazing for your kid. That’s waaaaay above normal. We read every night to the kids, but we aren’t a huge reading family (if that makes sense)
> What i never realized was that a LOT of these books,
This is part of a broader phenomenon, where most things are more complicated than you first think when you dig into it. This leads some people to assume work in areas they don't understand is easy.
I have to typically impress in my first line support guys that “if you don’t want people to think your job is simple, then you shouldn’t assume the same of them”
Heck I get people that think MY job is just clicking next on installers, there are entire swaths of things we do that others simply aren’t aware of because it’s transparent to them. I even had one lady question how much I made based on that very assumption. (She’s not a very nice person in general anyway)
Anecdote: I was in a corporate (software) packaging (and deployment) team for a fleet of ten thousand workstations.
The new CIO knew not our role and assumed we were a physical packaging team, dealing with bubble wrap and cardboard boxes - "why do we pay them so much?"
YES — you're nailing something that I've felt but haven't been able to articulate.
The worst children's books are ones that don't roll off the tongue, that use too-complicated phraseology, that through circumlocution challenge the rea—well, you get it. They trip me up!
This is similar to ABBA songs: Superficially, they seem very simple, but they are quite complex internally, and when something is repeated, then it is often repeated in a slightly different way.
Actually the story about the Dr. Suess books is that they were deliberately written with only some limited number of words. IIRC there is a range of his books with fewer and fewer words, because he was getting challenged by his editor.
It may be an urban legend, but I think Green Eggs and Ham was based on a bet that Dr Suess couldn't write a book with less than 50 words long. Fair to say that he would have won that bet.
Some books I’m willing to read repeatedly: I Am A Bunny, and I Am A Mouse, both by Ole Risom and illustrated by Richard Scarry and John P. Miller, respectively, in a realistic style, as if they actually made the time to observe the plants and animals; Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; Stack the Cats, by Susan Ghahremani; and Bear and Wolf, by Daniel Salmieri. The latter is my favorite so far because of this line, among others:
“Bear and Wolf walked through the quietly falling snow, using their eyes, and ears, and noses to take in the snowy woods.”
Bear is female, Wolf is male, and they are at home in the cold, as we can be if we allow ourselves to acclimate. They explore together, go they separate ways, and meet again in late spring.
On the page in Goodnight Moon where the mouse is peeking out from behind the bowl full of mush, our 3-year old has started shouting at it "NO NO YOUNG MOUSE, GET AWAY FROM MY MUSH!!!" Makes me laugh every time.
I love that part, and also "goodnight nobody" - the book starts out being very concrete (saying good night to all the things in the room) then expands out to encompass everything and nothing. It feels at once poetic and childlike.
While Goodnight Moon is everyone's favorite, there is something about "The Little Island" by Margaret Wise Brown that captured me as a parent. I loved reading this story out loud. The writing is poetic and flows off the tongue. The story has some nuance, that to this day I'm still not sure I fully grasp. This is my favorite book to give as a gift to new parents.
I honestly think that Frog and Toad has lessons that are applicable even for adults. My wife and I will sometimes quote things like "'What we need is willpower,' said Frog." when meaning to stop snacking on something.
Also, I find Owl at Home intriguingly solipsistic, but that's not really a concept that I think my kids would understand.
I echo all of this, including in appreciation of Carle's work. Despite the simple language, there's a sophistication and depth to the best children's books that mediocre ones lack.
My favorite to read to my little guys is _This is Not My Hat_ by Jon Klassen, which is one of the funniest, most subtle ones we've come across.
Jon Klassen is great! Simple yet beautiful art and stories that are fun for both the parents and the kids. I love the final line of This Is Not My Hat, which works on two levels: "Nobody will ever find me."
It can be surprisingly hard to find children's books that tell a story with a beginning, middle and end, and with writing that is engaging.
I distinctly remember one day Skyping with my mother telling her how hard it was to find good kids books and using "A Sick Day for Amos McGee" as an example of a good one. I recited a few lines to demonstrate the language, "Every day when his alarm clock clanged Amos swung his legs out of bed and swapped his pajamas for a fresh-pressed uniform"... my daughter, to my surprise (not yet old enough to talk at the time) rushed into the other room to fetch the book.
Adding to the recommended books: 'Bats at the Beach' by Brian Lies.
My kids never got tired of me reading it and I never got tired of reading it. They loved that book. The illustrations are extremely well done. Who would draw bats wearing floaties?
I don't like this idea of grouping them all as similar. There's a huge range of toddler-focused books, some are great, some are awful, most are in-between.
Brown Bear, Brown Bear from Carle himself is mediocre junk. It's just colors and animals, and has no character, no narrative, no arc.
The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar is an amazing, astounding masterpiece. It is usually printed with a sort of dynamic tactical approach with different page sizes, holes in the pages, the story has a real arc, it teaches biology, it carefully works in numbers and days of the week and the idea of time frame… it's a true stand-out.
Most of Carle's stuff is somewhere in the middle, though he has a few other superb ones.
Just like art for older audiences, there really is a range. You could say that all movies are the same: people having conflicts and doing stuff. On some level, they're all dramatic and simplistic.
It's not mere taste. What makes a great book or movie for any age is not total relativism.
Brown Bear, Brown Bear is an excellent book for very young children (say, under 2 years old). It’s not a deep book, but it is not trying to be.
It has attractive clear illustrations of one animal per page, a simple repeating structure with only a few new words each page, nice rhyme/meter. Its structure involves repeatedly anticipating the next animal, which makes it easy to memorize.
It is a book my kids enjoyed “reading” aloud to themselves at age 1.5–2 before they could fully remember the content of more complicated picture books.
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Of course, this isn’t the only type of book small kids should be listening to, and in the genre of extremely simple picture books there is a lot of abject garbage.
Like the other commenter I also thought the book was a dud and had nothing going on. But the "a teacher is what I see" finally clicked that series' large pictures were designed to communicate at distance. When my 8 month old wants to grab everything and not settle down to sleep, I can read her that book while she's in the crib and the calming cadence does its work. Will be fun to see her read it like your kids one day.
I can much more readily appreciate actually doing I-spy game in a physical space rather than a book like that.
But I'm not actually opposed to the basic structure of "animal color" that Brown Bear has, I think it could retain that and somehow also get more effective nuance. It's entirely superficial. Note also that 2yo's don't have an experience and relation to classes and teachers, so that doesn't even fit. The very same structure could be less arbitrary and be used instead to connect associations that are worthwhile making for the 2yo's, the way that Hungry Hungry Caterpillar doesn't just show randomness, it actually fits a real biological context.
Adapt Brown Bear to highlight an ecosystem that goes together and it would be superior and still achieve all the same interest in the 2yo's.
My kid went thought a phase of really liking "Brown Bear, Brown Bear." Probably about the same age. And I think you're right -- it's the anticipation of seeing what the next animal / color combination will be.
Another one in a similar vein, which my kid liked, was "Here Are My Hands"
My kids had a book about a wolf who made soup with a stone, "Une soupe aux caillou".
The wolf travels to other animals' homes; the animals are afraid at first, but they let him in because he says he only wants to make soup.
He comes in, boils water in a big pot, puts his stone in. The animals want to help with the soup, and so they suggest other ingredients. The wolf says "well, sure, you can add that if you want".
They drink the soup together. Then the wolf gets up, takes his stone back from the pot, and leaves.
The process repeats for 8 or 10 different animals, and that's it.
It's a fantastic book. We must have read it hundreds of times.
I've heard that a lot of children's media often looks to help encourage pattern recognition (eg: counting the Very Hungry Caterpillar's foods or the structure of a Blue's Clues episode), but I don't know how true that is.
I've heard a corollary to this. Kids often love to watch/read the same thing because they recognize the pattern and know what is coming up next. This gives them comfort and a routine.
for me, it was much easier to read books like Little Blue Truck or Goodnight Moon night after night to my kids because they rhyme. I could memorize the poetry and read it as my boys went to sleep while half-asleep myself.
This is very true. I have the same response to many (but not all) Julia Donaldson books. I could happily read the Snail and the Whale every night to my kids. My son loved them all, but for some reason my daughter never took to them and it's always made me a bit sad that I don't get to read them to her.
