ABSTRACT
The recognition that babies can be readers is fairly recent in Brazil and Mexico. For a long time, it was believed that the ability to understand complex relationships between sounds and graphic symbols was almost indispensable for reading. In the last few decades Brazil and Mexico have supported programs to encourage reading and equip kindergarten, elementary and secondary schools with a high-quality, universal book collection. The impact that such national initiatives have had on the publishing industry is evident in the development of guilds of authors, illustrators and publishers specializing in books for early childhood. Quality has been the fundamental selection criterion for analysis. The determination of such quality revolves around two main axes: the multi-cultural features in the early childhood literary books, and the main subjects used to narrate the life of young children: their needs, their fears, their socialization challenges, and their experience of being young children.
