Are Toddlers Too Young for STEM Books? A Patent Attorney's Honest Answer
I get this question more than any other from parents at the preschool I co-founded. Are toddlers too young for STEM?
No. The long answer is what changes about STEM when you write it for ages 2 to 4 instead of ages 5 and up.
STEM for toddlers is not STEM for older kids, shrunk down
Most STEM books for K-2 readers introduce content. The water cycle. The food chain. Simple machines. Those are facts. Toddlers do not need facts yet. They need habits of mind, and the habits are social and emotional before they are anything else.
The habits that matter at ages 2 to 4 are these:
- Notice the world. Pay attention long enough to be bothered by something.
- Ask why. Not as a power play. As a tool.
- Spot puzzles in everyday things.
- Try something. A scribble. A piece of tape. A guess.
- Try again when it does not work. And feel frustrated first, out loud, because that is allowed.
That list is the inventor's mindset. Every adult inventor I have worked with in more than 20 years of patent practice runs on it. None of them learned it from a book about the water cycle.
What the research says about timing
By age 6, children have already started telling themselves a story about who "does science" and who does not. Lin Bian and her colleagues put the turn between age 5 and age 6 in a 2017 study in Science. The window in which a toddler decides that noticing, asking, and building are for people like them closes faster than most parents expect.
STEM books for ages 2 to 4 are the most upstream thing you can do about it.
What "doing STEM" looks like at age two
- Watching a leaf fall and saying "again?"
- Pulling apart a cardboard tube to see what is inside
- Pointing at the ceiling fan and saying "why?"
- Stacking blocks and noticing they fall
- Telling you a friend looked sad
Every one of those is data collection or a hypothesis test. The last one is the one most STEM lists leave out, and it is the one that decides whether the child will ever share what they build.
Books that work this way
The whole Kit's Little Sparks series is built around the habits, not the content. Phase 1: Wondering (Books 1 to 4) is the entry point. Book 1 ends with a question for the child, "What will YOU see?", and the next time you walk past a ceiling fan together you will find out.
Chris Kuczynski is an engineer turned registered patent attorney, a preschool co-founder, and a dad. He is the author of Kit's Little Sparks, a 20-book STEM series that gives children ages 2 to 4 the social and emotional foundations of the inventor's mindset. It is the first of four age-tiered series for readers ages 2 to 12.
Written by Chris Kuczynski
