A baby book is the only one where the subject will not remember any of it. Every other book is written for somebody who was there.
That single fact should change how it is written, and almost nobody lets it.
Who you are actually writing to
Two readers, at two different times:
The parents, now. Exhausted, in the middle of it, and the book is a record of a year they partly cannot recall themselves.
The child, in twenty years. Reading about a person they have no memory of being.
Write for the second one. The parents lived it and will remember more than the captions can hold; the child has nothing except what is written down.
What the twenty-year-old reader wants
Not how loved they were. They know, and a book that says it forty times is a book of one sentence.
What they want is the specifics they cannot know:
- What they were like. Cross at being put down, fine with strangers, would not sleep unless somebody was singing.
- What the household was like. The flat, the street, who visited, what was going on.
- What things cost, what was happening in the world, what everybody was worried about.
- What the parents were like at that age. This is the one nobody writes and the one that lands hardest.
| Write | Not |
|---|---|
| “You would only sleep on Papa’s chest” | “Our little angel” |
| “The flat in Powai, before the lift worked” | “Home sweet home” |
| “Nani flew down for six weeks” | “Surrounded by love” |
| “Amma was 29 and terrified” | “Blessed” |
Dates, more than any other book
A baby changes weekly. A photograph at four months and one at seven are of different people, and neither the parents nor the child can tell them apart later.
Write the age, not just the date. “Eleven weeks” is more useful than “March”, and it is the one caption convention that is specific to this book.
The one about the parents
Worth a section because it is consistently the most valued page and it is almost never in the book.
Write down what the parents were doing, thinking and worried about. Their jobs, the flat, whether they knew what they were doing. A child reading at twenty-five is, for the first time, capable of being interested in their parents as people the same age.
Nobody writes it because it feels like the book is not about them. It is the part that gets read most. Your first anniversary with a baby →
Keep it short
A first-year book is a picture book. Long captions on every page turn it into a memoir with photographs, and nobody reads it to a child that way.
Short, factual, one longer piece at the front and one at the end. What to write on the first page →
Frequently asked
What should I write in a baby photo book? Specifics the child cannot know later — what they were like, what the household was like, and what the parents were doing.
Who is the book actually for? The child at twenty, more than the parents now. The parents will remember; the child has only what is written.
Should I write the date or the age? The age. “Eleven weeks” tells you more than a month does, and a baby changes weekly.
What should I avoid? Repeated declarations of love. It is one sentence, and forty versions of it crowd out the facts.
What is the most-read page later? Whatever you write about the parents at that age. It is almost never included.
Part of our guide to captions and messages. See also: captions that make sense in thirty years and first birthday gift ideas.
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