The best picture books to build a baby’s brain

This nursery classic provides exactly what babies deserve in a bedtime story: A lively, inventive text that their parents can read out loud, with intriguing pictures that their parents can talk about. To learn language, babies and toddlers need us to chat with them, ask questions of them (even if they’re too small to reply), and show them things and explain what they are seeing. A clever parent will not only read Margaret Wise Brown’s rhyming story about a little rabbit going to sleep “in the great green room,” but also engage in playful and informal chitchat about Clement Hurd’s pictures.

This brilliant and surprisingly sophisticated book has a satisfying rhyming pace that breaks every other page, both visually and aurally, into a“Peek-a-Boo!” Tracing one day in the life of a baby boy in wartime London, it’s full of cues for parents to engage in questions and answers. For instance, the baby in the book goes to the park; the scene contains, inter alia, two perambulators, a double-decker bus, a picket fence, a zeppelin, a church spire, pink flowers, children fishing in a shallow pond, a policeman, boys with a toy boat, a gentleman carrying a walking stick and a rolled-up newspaper…. you get the idea.

This beloved railway fable has all sorts of things to spark a baby’s interest: reader-supplied sound effects (“Chug, chug, chug, puff, puff, puff”), a simple and wholesome moral message that toddlers can understand, and delicious old-fashioned illustrations by Watty Piper that exude a feeling of welcome and good cheer. The pictures of train cargo have lots of amusing little details to draw the eye: “bottles of creamy milk” striding along on tiny legs, smiling faces on the “big golden oranges [and] red-cheeked apples,” and a traveling menagerie of dolls, animals and lifelike toys. It’s also a great book for introducing spatial concepts such as up/down and in/out.

This book hits a kind of non-narrative sweet spot: It doesn’t tell a specific story, but every page-spread is a feast of beauty and interest and there are just enough words sprinkled here and there to encourage parents to supply their own commentary. This particular book happened to be a huge favorite in my family, but any collection that introduces great paintings and different styles of art will do the trick. I love making art part of a baby’s world from the get-go: It awakens the aesthetic senses and gives a child a sense of cultural ownership. Later, seeing a Vermeer or a Picasso, we can hope that child will feel a sparkle of recognition.

Try to get your hands on the original 1963 edition that made Richard Scarry‘s fortune and allowed him to move his family to Switzerland, for the skiing. It’s a fabulous book that’s crowded with scenes of purpose and industry, and with labeled pictures that bespeak the world’s exciting wideness. There are birds (the quail, pheasant, wren, bittern), buildings (a cathedral, pyramid, fort, skyscraper), flowers (clover, pansies, asters, foxgloves), and houses (the igloo, grass house, half-timbered house, chalet). Over time, subsequent editions were stripped of this eccentric specificity and of Scarry’s courtly depictions of traditional social roles (gone, for instance, are the “handsome pilot” and the “pretty stewardess”).