To not want to read really shit books to my baby?

[CooCooCaChu]

I've got an eight month old baby. We've got lots of really basic baby books. You know the kind, red circle on one page, blue triangle on the next. Or the endless 'that's not my ...'.

I find it incredibly boring to keep going 'oh look, this is a cow. Moooo.'

If I don't read these basic books, will she miss out on something important developmentally? Or can I skip straight to things with more of a narrative so I don't feel the need to stab myself in the eye just to create a bit of excitement?

Yabu you need to spend hours reading 'here is a car, brum brum'
Yanbu read something more fun, your baby will probably enjoy it more anyway

Look up Britta Teckentrup. Her books are beautiful and I actually enjoy reading them too! 'Tree' is a personal fave of mine 😂

PS - my kids are now 5 and 8, are really bright and have great vocabularies and know all the colours, numbers, textures etc. You don't need to read them crap to teach them that stuff. Just speak to them about the world around them!

These threads make me feel incredibly guilty that my poor mother read the same book every night to me for about 4 years or I wouldn't sleep.

I’m 100% a book fan but everyone acting like the baby books are essential for learning sounds etc are not really right. What’s essential is talking to babies, making familiar sounds over and over again and so on. The colours/animal noises/shapes is just a way of doing that. But you could be reading out the Screwfix catalogue or the TV listing, it’d have the same effect. They will definitely learn shapes and that a cow goes moo even if you don’t have a baby book with shapes and cow noises in it. I’m quite certain on that. You don’t have to suffer boring books if you personally don’t want to. Teach shapes by playing with shapes and read something thin enjoy!

Wait until they start reading to you and you get endless variations of “This is Chip. Chip is going to the park. Chip walks to the park. Chip likes the park. Chip had fun at the park.” spread out over the 20 minutes it takes them to sound it all out. Hoo boy.

Oh dear....wait until school and the Biff and Chip books come along followed by all 719 Rainbow Fairy books. Now they are tedious 😂
Seriously though....babies like rhythm, bright colours and the same blimmin book over and over.
At 8 months you can be moving on to books with more words. A well illustrated book of nursery rhymes are good for rhythm and you can play by doing actions or books like Peppo and Each Peach Pear Plum which are written in rhyme (and have amazing illustrations - so sometimes you don't even need to read the words you can just talk about the pictures).
The books that are books of colours, shapes etc can be used more for play - picture of a red ball - "go find me a ball" or "can you find your red blanket". You often find that babies will start to "read" these books by themselves - ie sit there, turn the pages, chew the book a bit all while just looking at the pretty colours. You don't necessarily need to be reading these books.
Just have fun with books (while you can.... before the dreaded Biff and Chip happens).

I’m with you. This is totally outing, but what the hell. We were given a book called ‘rocket science for babies’ and I admit I rolled my eyes. But it became my son’s favourite book - he could recite it, aged two, all about exploding rocket fuel and lift forces 😆

I'd read something more coherent at bed time and do the basic baby books as play in the day. Best of both worlds.

Time to go and read to my 10yo (he's dyslexic and struggles with novels so I still read to him which still benefits his vocabulary/ language. And it's a nice cosy bit of togetherness at the end of the day.

(Harry's just about to find out what the smashed prophecy said...)

It was nice to get through a whole book in 15 minutes when they were little!

Try The Elephant and the Bad Baby.
It's still one of my favourite books.

Came to say this.

I still have nightmares about Chip, Biff and Kipper and that fucking magic key.🤣

Not rtft but just buy your baby nice books that you enjoy reading. Goodnight Moon, Each Peach Pear Plum, anything Julia Donaldson, anything Alison Lester, anything Jon Klassen, Eric Carle, Helen Oxenbury. There are so many lovely kids books with a nice lilt to them.

At that age I read my kid books that were aimed at children but that I found fun or funny to read, especially the poetry type ones. Then they get something new from them all the time as they get older. My favourites were the hairy maclary ones. Anything you can turn into a fun drama sort of thing is good. I can still say all of slinky malinki off by heart and my 4yr old sometimes asks me to do it while we're in the car.

You can point to things in most children's books to make it more their level.

But if you can't stomach these, god help you when you get Biff, Chip and bloody Kipper. Like fingers down a blackboard!

I like the ones that are nice to read aloud like Peepo, Each Peach Pear Plum, Shark in the Park, anything Julia Donaldson.

I adore this book - utter genius

I can still recite the whole of Each Peach Pear Plum! My youngest is 21. 😳

Read something with a story; you can always point to the pictures as you read.
when mine were young we read the Gruffalo, each peach pear plum, hairy mcclary and I liked Charlie and Lola as the illustrations are brilliant.
lots of fabulous children’s books out there.

Me too!
my youngest is 17.

You can read them anything at that age - my DF used to read mine the Financial Times…

haha me too. And The Gruffalo. My youngest is also 20!

All the Nick Sharratt and Anthony Browne books are painless, I found

I am sure a child psychologist will be along shortly, but I think they do benefit from the repetition for comprehension, and obviously the simple words and sounds build language.

If you think it’s eye-stabby now, wait till your 3 year old wants the same book every day for 2 months.

I don’t see why you can’t change it up sometimes though. True Crime might be worth a whirl. Simple sentence structure, lots of scope for dramatic mummy acting.

My kids loved the Baby loves programming, aerospace, physics series. Basic but colourful and fun. A bit different to the usual stories.

Funny, but until recently I was working with teens with learning difficulties. As part of one of their literacy assessments, they had to rhyme some simple words, eg nice. A couple of them couldn't do it, at all. My boss said that she is seeing this more and more, as reading nursery rhymes to children is on the decline (at least at home). They are so important!

Those ones about the gosling were loved by my dc. Oliver Jeffries?

All the julia Donaldson. One of the dc loved, loved, loved tiger who came to tea. We had to alternate in the end cos we couldn't cope. Think my user name was created in the throes of that period.

I also used to sing when they were v little. Folk ballads and narrative songs. Worried too much tom waits would damage them, but they're fine.

The That's Not My... books are about the pictures, touch and introducing baby to descriptive language. It's just another way of allowing you to sit and interact with your baby. I suppose you need to grudgingly accept that you aren't the target audience and you're just the facilitator. But you certainly don't need to spend hours reading them, they only take 5 minutes!

But do try to find a special story book, there are so many out there to try. Once you find some it's so lovely to see your baby interact with the story as they get older. The repetition rarely gets easier, but that's parenting in a nutshell I suppose!