If the Baby Einstein products were meant to introduce babies to high culture, from the music of Beethoven and Mozart to the art of da Vinci and van Gogh, many of the STEM board books seem to have more worldly goals. Babies learning about coding and structural engineering are babies getting ready to work.

When I spoke with Peg Oliveira, the director of the Gesell Program in Early Childhood at the Yale Child Study Center, she called these books “a PowerPoint presentation dressed up as a board book.” But Oliveira thinks their deficiencies go beyond that. “The whole goal of board books is to build preliteracy skills,” she said, “introducing babies and toddlers to the idea that books are fun and reading is pleasurable. What do babies learn from a board book about electromagnetics? That books are boring and reading is hard.”

“We expect children to clear academic hurdles at younger and younger ages—counting by preschool, reading by kindergarten,” Oliveira went on. And now, apparently, quantum physics by toddlerhood. The capabilities that children require to succeed in the world are both more basic and more sophisticated than what these books offer: things like problem-solving, curiosity, creativity, and perseverance.

As Oliveira described it, reading with babies is a process of “serve and return, like in a game of tennis: the parent offers something and the child responds, keeping the game going.” When thinking about material for children, she said, “You want to ask, Does it meet the developmental needs of the child now, and does it support them in trying out the next stage of development?” Does it push the child to grow? “We learn like going up stairs,” she said. “We need some help, some stability before we take the next step.” This framework for early literacy underscores why it’s so important for board books to offer familiar language and simple story lines. During the crucial period before the age of three, infants and toddlers are building the skills that will eventually turn them into readers: first, they learn to understand individual words, then to recite lines from their favorite books, then to grasp the rudiments of stories and to create their own.

To Oliveira, a good board book has “words that are fun in your mouth”—a text bolstered by rhyme, rhythm, and repetition—along with bright, high-contrast pictures of things a baby can name. By these metrics, board books that shine include Bruce Degen’s “Jamberry,” Margaret Wise Brown’s “Goodnight Moon,” and the entire Sandra Boynton œuvre. It seems almost unfair to compare lines like “Quickberry! Quackberry! Pick me a blackberry!”(from “Jamberry”) and “Rhinoceroses SNORT and SNUFF and little dogs go RUFF RUFF RUFF!” (from “Moo, Baa, La La La”) with the eye-glazing statement “Everything in the world is made of atoms and molecules” (from “Baby Loves Quarks!”).

Infants and toddlers are unique end users, since they can’t choose, buy, or rate the product themselves. But reports from parents and caregivers can give us an idea. Another librarian I met, Nora Reilly, of Sandy Hook, Connecticut, purchased several Spiro books for her grandson. “He liked them when he was about nine months old,” she said. “I think he was attracted to the illustrations of the baby’s faces, especially the eyes. But, after he turned one, the books didn’t hold his attention.” In other words, at just the age when a child can recognize familiar objects based on the words being read aloud, the science jargon made the books inaccessible: their language became a barrier rather than a gateway to understanding.

Kate Sheblak, a parent of a twenty-month-old in Green Bay, Wisconsin, owns five of the “Baby Loves Science” titles. The enthusiasm that her daughter, Elliott, showed for the books peaked at around twelve to fifteen months, Sheblak told me, but she saw more value in the series than Reilly did. “Elliott liked the simple illustrations,” she said. “The thermodynamics one has a kitty, baby, and sun that she could point to and name.” Both Sheblak and her husband have technical backgrounds, and they found that “some of the analogies the books use don’t make a ton of sense.” Still, she added, “My mom was very big on ‘You can’t read too many books to a baby.’ ”