Toddler always wants the same books

[SickAndTiredAgain]

DD will be 3 in June and every night before bed we read three stories. Always the same three peppa pig stories.

I know it doesn’t really matter, and I know it’s common for toddlers to want to read the same book over and over, but if I have to read them one more time I may lose the plot. She has a lot of books I’d love to read to her, some because they’re good, and some just because they’re different, but she is very insistent on these three every night.

When do they grow out of this?

A friend of mine had this, she ended up recording her voice reading the books because she got fed up of sitting there every night reading the same books !
I never read to mine in bed because of this, we always read downstairs.

Ah, fond memories of hiding You Choose because if I had to 'read' it one more time I'd lose my mind. 9 now and gets through new books like clean pants.

Ha it is developmentally normal at this age! Can you gradually add another book to the mix and swap one out?

@JuneOsborne

Ah, fond memories of hiding You Choose because if I had to 'read' it one more time I'd lose my mind. 9 now and gets through new books like clean pants.

Yeah we had this silly me got You chose your dreams so then there was two of them 😩

Go to the library to choose new ones. Hopefully they will be excited by that.

Oh yes, sometimes it was brutal. I'd hide and rotate books from my dds room. If she made a fuss I'd totally exaggerate the new story with pitch and tone of voice until she giggled and got curious. It also helped to get her to pick booked at the library with me.

We did 2 stories. Mummy chooses one, and toddler chooses one.

My 5 year old still wants the same stories on rotation.

I now insist on two stories - he chooses one, I choose one.

At least that way sometimes he likes the new story and it gets added in to his rotation so we get a bit of variety.

If I really am fed up of a book I read it in the most boring way possible a few times. Fast, flat voice, no time for pictures. Childish but it usually works!

I also lose books, and allow a choice of three out of a pre selected five where three are newer ones, if we are in a bit of a rut.

When DD was in this phase, I made her read them to me and introduced a new one for me to read. Never more than 2 at bedtime though, so not quite as painful.

Following intently. My daughter is exactly the same.. every night we read:

The Little Red Hen
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Bouncing Babies
Little Lamb.

She’s not long turned 2 and we’ve been reading them over and over for months on end. She can now sit with the bouncing babies book and ‘read’ (memorise) it word for word and now reads it to me instead most nights 🤣
She’s almost doing the same with the other books but they’re a bit longer and wordier so she babbles nonsense with those still, but gives it a good go!

I’m so bored of the same bloody books every night

Introduce new books at a different time of day. I found with mine that if I sat down with a picture book to read “by myself” then I would soon have an interested toddler all over me wanting to join in!

And then once they have heard the new book once or twice then they are more likely to want it at bedtime. Warning though, you are just swapping in a new every-single-night book, it won’t revolutionise the whole thing. So pick one you can stand to read several million times

Yup. I read the same book every night… and then she goes to bed and listens to that same story on her yoto player over and over until she falls asleep too

My almost 7 year old still does it. What we've done is introduce longer stories (working our way through Roald Dahl currently) which take longer to read and found a few fact books that we choose a few pages to read each night. So it is the same book, but reading different bits and slightly less tedious.

Toddler also does it, I've found choosing new books at the library is exciting enough to mean we have different books a bit more now.

I can recite the Acorn Wood books off by heart.

We go to the library once a fortnight to get new books and check the local charity shops regularly for new ones. I hide ones I'm completely bored of so he has to find new ones.