A book can help with
For the things that stop a child in their tracks, and are worth stopping for.
Children are naturally struck by things adults have stopped seeing: the moon in the afternoon, a snail’s underside on glass, the fact that there’s anything at all. Wonder is one of the best things about being small, and it tends to get squeezed out by hurry.
Books can keep it alive. Some are simply beautiful enough to make a child go quiet. Others point out something extraordinary about the ordinary world and hand it over. Read these for no reason other than the pleasure of them, which is reason enough.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there. The curiosity page is a good neighbour to this one.
Noticing the world
Wonder at this age is not awe, it is noticing: that a thing is there, that it moves, that it is still there when you look again. What follows gives a baby something worth looking at twice.
Cut-out pages of spots, stripes and patterns in the high contrast a very new baby can actually make out, with an easy rhyme so they get used to the sound of your voice at the same time. One of the few books that genuinely suits the first weeks. It survives being lain on.
or on Bookshop.org
Nine sliders and a mirror at the end, so the reveal is something a toddler makes happen rather than watches. Arrhenius’s shapes and colours are unusually good to look at for a book designed to be hammered. The mirror is the bit they keep coming back for.
or on Bookshop.org
Elmer goes out in the rain, the sun, the wind and the snow, and a very young child gets the idea that the world outside changes and is worth looking at. Chunky enough for a one year old and still funny to a three year old. McKee’s colours do a lot of the work.
or on Bookshop.org
Look at that
For little ones it’s about noticing, and about being told that noticing is a fine way to spend an afternoon.
Written for his newborn son, this is a tour of the planet, its people, its seas and its sky, offered as a welcome. It manages to be funny and enormous at the same time, and it leaves a child rather awed by the ordinary fact of being here. Beautiful, and a lovely gift book.
or on Bookshop.org
Liam finds a struggling patch of plants on a disused railway and tends it, and slowly the whole grey city turns green. It celebrates paying close attention to a small thing, and where that can lead. Gorgeous to look at and quietly hopeful.
or on Bookshop.org
The extraordinary ordinary
Older children can hold bigger ideas, and enjoy discovering how strange the everyday world actually is.
An oversized book of spell-poems for nature words that have been dropping out of children’s dictionaries: acorn, otter, bramble, kingfisher. It’s made to be pored over rather than read straight through, and the paintings are extraordinary. A thing to own rather than borrow.
or on Bookshop.org
A father drives his children through the solar system, and at each planet works out what was happening back on Earth at that distance in time. It gives a child a genuine sense of scale, both of space and of history. Clever, funny and quietly moving.
or on Bookshop.org
The scale of things
Older children can hold a genuinely enormous idea in their head and rather enjoy the feeling of it. What follows is built to produce that feeling rather than to teach a topic.
Physics handed over as the science of absolutely everything: clouds, cars, rainbows, rain, sandwiches. The black hole in the title does the recruiting, and the rest of it is silly enough to be picked up and serious enough to stay picked up. Good for the child who has already decided science is not for them.
or on Bookshop.org
Four and a half billion years of the planet squeezed into a single twenty-four hour day, which leaves human beings turning up somewhere in the last few seconds before midnight. Large format, with a timeline running through it. The scale is the entire point, and it lands hard at eleven.
or on Bookshop.org
Book links are Amazon affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. More on this.
Something to do together
A page for recording one thing worth stopping for each day, however small. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Wonder needs time more than anything else. A child hurried from one thing to the next has no room to stand and look at a beetle for ten minutes, which is precisely what they should sometimes be doing.
So build in a bit of dawdling where you can, follow their gaze rather than moving them along, and let yourself be impressed alongside them. Children take their sense of what’s worth noticing largely from the grown-ups nearby.
For you, the grown-up
There’s a companion page for grown-ups over on the main Book Quote Therapy library, with books for adults who need to look up more.
Read the grown-up version →These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.