The need for STEM in public libraries is strong, and the surfeit of titles newly available can be uneven in effectiveness. One of the more interesting aspects of this STEM wave is board books that explore complicated scientific concepts, ostensibly written for the traditional baby audience. Books for kids who are unable to read themselves are often in some ways geared toward the adult, not the child, but these particular books for babies seem to be more adult-oriented than most.

There are three specific series that come to mind: Nerdy Babies by Emmy Kastner (Macmillan), Baby Loves Science by Irene Chan and Ruth Spiro (Penguin Random House), and Baby University by Chris Ferrie (Sourcebooks). All started publishing volumes a few years ago and continue to put out new titles regularly. The writers’ credentials are solid: they’re scientists or science educators themselves. But the question remains: how effectively do these books teach these concepts to babies? Is it even possible?

Kastner’s Nerdy Babies series so far includes Space and Ocean, with Weather and Rocks forthcoming in May. This series may be the most successful of the three at actually speaking to babies, or at least very young children. Kastner, who has taught high school English and science, uses a question and answer format and simple language, covering STEM topics that kids are interested in early in their lives. Kirkus and School Library Journal recommend this series for preschoolers and up, writing that these titles mostly succeed in their goal of introducing complicated concepts in a simple, developmentally appropriate way, an assessment I would agree with.

Chan and Spiro’s Baby Loves Science series has eight titles so far, covering aerospace engineering, quarks, thermodynamics, quantum physics, gravity, coding, green energy, and structural engineering. These are concepts that adults often find difficult to understand or explain even in general terms, and some of these words may be ones they’ve never come across at all. The marketing material from the publisher for the first four titles (“with tongue firmly in cheek”) makes it clear that these books are not entirely for babies, though it’s interesting that the marketing language takes a turn for the last four and insists that the books are developmentally appropriate for babies. Perhaps. The Kirkus review of the first two books – Aerospace Engineering and Quarks – is not gentle about the gulf between the intended and actual audiences for these books, calling them “absurd” and specifically making the argument that babies are not developmentally ready for these concepts. Their review of Baby Loves Coding is especially amusing to me, which begins with “A board book for the toddlers of Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average,” and ends with “Leave this developmentally inappropriate title on the shelf.”

And then there is Ferrie’s Baby University series, which includes a whopping 18 titles so far. Specific titles cover such topics as Newtonian physics, rocket science, general relativity, quantum entanglement, optical physics, electromagnetism, evolution, astrophysics, blockchain, and neural networks, plus much more. This series is by far the most ambitious of the three, with subject matter that many, if not most, adults are not familiar with at all. School Library Journal recommends it for grades 5 and up, suggesting that it could be a fun way to introduce older kids and adults to unfamiliar concepts, which I don’t dispute. Kirkus is, of course, the most plainspoken, finding fault not only with Rocket Science for Babies’ complicated concept, but also its vocabulary and its assumption that babies and toddlers are developmentally ready to understand ways information is often diagrammatically presented (such as with arrows to indicate airflow). They finish with: “the importance of understanding childhood development when writing for preschoolers cannot be overstated,” which is basically the theme – and the lesson – of this whole idea of STEM for babies.

Don’t get me wrong – these titles are attractive, interesting, and reasonably popular at my library. I expect parents consider them amusing or a bit of a novelty read, with information they themselves are interested in. Perhaps they are a good choice for an older child to read to a baby or toddler sibling, thereby introducing these concepts to a more age-appropriate reader. But every time a new one comes to my attention, I just have to laugh a little.