North Shore author celebrates 10 years of bestselling children’s book series

From Cheerios to guitar strings, author Ruth Spiro finds inspiration everywhere around her.

That’s why her children’s book series, Baby Loves Science, is still going strong, now celebrating its 10th year with 13 books and counting and more than 1 million copies sold since 2016.

Spiro, a Highland Park native and Deerfield resident, is slated to read and sign some of her picture books on Independent Bookstore Day, April 25, at Highland Park’s Matchmaker Bookshop, and conduct a storytime and signing on May 2 at Winnetka’s The Book Stall. Both events are free and open to the public.

Spiro has had three children’s books published this year alone, including one in the bestselling series, titled Baby Loves Robotics.

Though she enjoyed creative writing and literature classes in college and at Highland Park High School, Spiro said she didn’t always intend to be a writer.

Nonetheless, one might say, authorship found her instead after she read a 2010 article in The New York Times about how picture books sales were down. Spiro said the article attributed this decline to the fact that parents were bypassing picture books in favor of “more sophisticated reading material.”

“So, they were reading chapter books and Harry Potter to their very, very small children,” Spiro told The Record. “Picture books are important developmentally for little ones because it helps them learn to listen to the text and also match it with the visuals. I was talking with some writing friends, and it was kind of a joke and I said, ‘Well, what do these parents want? Quantum physics for babies?’”

Though the question was rhetorical at first, meant in jest, it got Spiro thinking, and she began to explore that line of inquiry further.

“I started to think about what the reasons were for parents moving on to higher level reading [for their children],” she said. “And I thought, well, what they’re looking for, really, is elevated content, right? They want to feel like their babies and toddlers are learning something while they’re reading to them. So, we love Pat the Bunny and ‘Goodnight Moon,’ and all those classics are great, but it seemed like maybe they were looking for something, a little meatier and a little bit more educational for their little ones.”

And so, Spiro pinpointed the angle that would soon develop into a series: She could write books for young children on complex, science concepts.

Before writing, she researched child development and how babies acquire language to see what would be appropriate at different age levels.

“I used that information to guide how I structured the books and what elements they needed to include and how to best present the material,” Spiro said of the next steps.

The first two books of the series, “Baby Loves Quarks” and “Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering,” were published in 2016.

“The first one that I wrote was ‘Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering,’ which sounds very complicated, but really it stemmed from a question that my daughters asked when they were little,” she said. “We would be at the park watching birds and, well, ‘How do birds fly?’ And I didn’t really know what to tell them. I was like, ‘Oh, with their wings.’ But really, there’s science behind it.”

Each book in the series has started that way: with a question a small child would ask or an observation a baby, toddler or preschooler might make or find familiar.

Spiro cited the educational concept of scaffolding, in which one takes something a child is already familiar with and then builds upon that.

“For example, you’ve got a little one sitting in a high chair and they’re very often dropping the Cheerios or crackers and watching them fall,” she said. “That’s gravity. And I learned in my research that this has actually been studied: Babies as young as 8 or 9 months understand that if you drop something, it’s going to fall. … So, intuitively, you know babies are little scientists.”

She provided another example, too, about how guitar strings inspired a book about the five senses.

“I was thinking, if somebody plucks a guitar string, I can hear that sound, but I can’t see it,” Spiro said. “What is that? Where does sound come from? How does plucking a guitar string turn into something musical that I hear? … I looked it up, and I was like, wow, this is really fascinating. It has to do with molecules moving through the air and bumping into one another. … This is so helpful. And then I was able to turn that book into the whole five senses.”

For Spiro, who started out in advertising, the creative spark and skillset that comes with writing are invaluable for everyone.

“If you can write well, and that’s a strength that you have, that is something that will help you throughout life,” Spiro said of the value of writing, which she learned working many different jobs. “I know that things are changing with AI and all that, but it still cannot replace the idea of something that’s created by an actual human being. It just can’t.””

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