Time for Bed: Baby’s Bedtime Routine. (Baby Steps)

The sixth book in the “Baby Steps” series, Time for Bed provides parents, especially new ones, with some practical advice on dealing with what can be, for some, a challenging time of day - that point being the child’s bedtime. As the subtitle indicates, the authors are offering a suggested template for a child’s bedtime routine. And all families do have bedtime routines, but not all of them have been put into place by the parents.

Because Time for Bed is a board book to be shared with a child, Carol McDougall & Shanda LaRamee-Jones don’t just tell the parents what to do. Instead, the authors actively engage the child listener in creating the sequence of steps leading to bedtime.

With one exception, each of the nine pairs of facing pages contains one page of text and a page bearing a full-colour photo. After the opening pages that featured the text excerpt above and a photo of a yawning child, the text on the next page pair asks, What do we do first? with the visual clue to the answer being a yellow rubber ducky. Turning the page reveals a smiling, soapsuds-covered child holding the yellow rubber ducky while sitting in a bathtub. Photos of a tooth brush and “jammies” provide the visual hints to the answers to the questions regarding the next two steps.

What is particularly worthy of note is how the authors’ text stresses the positive found in each going-to-bed step. For example:

First it’s bath time fun
with giggles and bubbles
and scrubbing clean
from head to toe

Brushing teeth results in “your beautiful smile”, and those jammies are “Warm and soft and cozy”.

The final step in the suggested routine is not preceded by a question. Instead, the authors describe it as “... the best part of all...” because it consists of:

A cuddle and a kiss
and a story and a song

The penultimate pair of pages then finds a child sound asleep.

Time for Bed closes with a pair of pages labeled “Bedtime Tips”. Here, the authors extend the board book’s content and offer additional suggestions, such as “Start[ing] your bedtime routine at least half an hour before you say good night” or “Turning off the TV, tablets, and other electronic devices” because “the light from these devices can interfere with your baby’s sleep pattern.”

The photos in Time for Bed are attractive and racially inclusive. My one small quibble, “Because it’s 2018!", is that the only time an adult/parent appears in a photo, that person is a “mother”, and she’s on the “the best part of all” page doing the cuddling, kissing, reading and singing.

Time for Bed and the other books in the “Baby Steps” series would make excellent gifts for new parents and definitely belong in public library collections.