I am a mother of a 17 month old girl and I had her do the Baby Can Read program. I did this because I struggled with reading and vocabulary in school. My daughter has been successful with the program and can read better then my nieces and nephews who are 3 and 5 years old. I am not bragging because I watch my nieces and nephews during the day and want them to succeed as well. I only let my daughter watch the videos at the most twice a day (30 minutes) and no other TV. The rest of the day she is allowed to explore play and be a toddler. Now I have been teaching her more new words on a daily basis and has learned them after two or three times after seeing and hearing the word. I think she can read close to 200 words. I don’t see what can be wrong with this? My other nephew (who is 8 months older then my daughter) throws tantrums because he can’t communicate what he wants …my daughter who has been able to develop her speech at a faster rate does not throw fits because she is able to communicate to me what she needs. I am still struggling with the idea of parents being scolded for teaching their kids how to en they are able and ready to learn? Is there any information or studies to show how this is not beneficial? So far I have not seen it…if I do in the next few years I will let you know…

First of all, I sincerely apologize if you felt I was scolding you for teaching your baby to read.  It’s clear you care passionately for your daughter, and I understand and admire your desire to help her avoid the reading difficulties you experienced as a child.  It sounds to me like she would have good communication skills for her age regardless of her ability to recognize words in print because of your attentive care and the time you spend reading and talking to her.

My point is this: Babies need to build a good base for reading comprehension through natural interactions with parents and caregivers and real experiences in the world. They need to internalize words with all their senses, like your daughter does when you tell her about the warm water and yellow washcloth you bathe her with, or acknowledge the birds, big trucks, or helicopters she hears outside. These language lessons are not the isolated words heard in videos or images on flashcards. They are in context and have relevance to your baby’s life.  When we direct a baby — eager to explore his world — to words on a page, flashcard or TV screen we are misunderstanding brain development.

I don’t judge you (or any parent) for giving children early academic instruction. We all have good intentions. Parenting is a series of difficult choices, and we’re all choosing the best we can. I do assail supposed ‘experts’ — product manufacturers and marketers — for capitalizing on a parent’s worries, misleading us with false claims, misinformation, and fabricated ‘studies’ that support their pitches.   

Yes, babies are ready and able to learn. That is one thing all the experts agree upon. The first years are a crucial period for brain development. Those who sell early learning products (that can run as much as $200) will tell you to take advantage of this precious time by using videos and flashcards to stuff babies with information (which they call ‘knowledge’), get them on a “fast track” by gaining precocious reading and math abilities before school even begins. However, other psychologists, neuropsychologists and educators warn that teaching babies to read is not only a waste of time and money, but can be detrimental to the higher level brain function a child needs to be a success in school, and even have emotional consequences.

So, to your question: where is this information that shows teaching babies to read is not beneficial? I didn’t have to dig deeply to find examples, even though these experts, researchers, and educators don’t have marketing campaigns, TV commercials or 800 numbers. Here are a few of their opinions:

Regarding the “earlier is better” myth… Early childhood educator Tonya Wright, in her insightful article “Teach Your Baby To Read???“ (on the site: Literacy Connections – Promoting Literacy And A Love Of Reading), writes, “Really…what is the rush? Do we stand a four-month old up on his feet in an effort to make him “walk”? Because surely if he walks at 4 months old, he will be the best walker in his class by the time he gets to kindergarten! Why do we have to rush children? Why do the wonders of infancy have to be punctuated with flashcards and DVDs?”

Psychologist/neuropsychologist Marsha Lucas, Ph.D., explores the threat early instruction can be to healthy cognitive development and secure attachment in “Your Baby SHOULDN’T read” (Psychology Today). ”The brains of young children aren’t yet developed enough to read without it costing them in the organization and “wiring” of their brain. The areas involved in language and reading aren’t fully online — and aren’t connected — until age seven or eight. If we’re teaching children to do tasks which their brains are not yet developed to do via the “normal” (and most efficient) pathways, the brain will stumble upon other, less efficient ways to accomplish the tasks — which lays down wiring in some funky ways — and can lead to later learning disabilities, including visual-processing deficits.”

Educator, brain researcher, reading/learning specialist Jane Healy, Ph.D., explains in her book Your Child’s Growing Mind , “Yes, even babies can be trained to recognize words. Babies, however, cannot read, tapping into a vast personal storehouse of language knowledge that takes years to build. Most preschoolers, likewise, can be trained through a stimulus-response type of teaching. The human brain can be trained to do almost anything, if the task is simplified enough and one is willing to devote the necessary time and energy. Yet the brain power – and possibly the neural connections – are stolen from the foundation of real intelligence. Reading becomes a low-level skill, and there is a danger that it will remain at the level where it was learned and practiced.

I believe that formally teaching reading to preschoolers is a serious intrusion on natural mental growth. Only a few, who spontaneously, motivated by their own curiosity, teach themselves to read because they want to find out the meaning, are true early readers. Pushing others to call out words is a grossly oversimplified version of a complex intellectual feat.  If we get children to “read” words before they have ideas, thought and language to make reading interesting, we hand them a key to the door of an unfinished garden.”

In Your Self-Confident Baby, infant expert Magda Gerber implores, “Does it ever come up later in one’s life whether a person learned to read at four, five, or six?  Learning academic skills should be saved for school-age children. Before that, let your child learn and follow his own rhythm. If you push, he loses his appetite for learning. And it’s that appetite that makes him interested and want to learn.”

I don’t believe you hindered your daughter by teaching her to read. But I do feel protective (maybe overly so) of those first years of a child’s life.  I know how hard it is not to project, to worry about every aspect of our baby’s development, rather than accept what our babies choose to do — and do naturally – as enough.  My hope for all of us is to find a way to slow down and enjoy the present, relax, trust nature, our children and ourselves. 

For more, please read the articles and books linked to (above) and my other posts on this subject: “Your Baby Can Read” Costs Too Much and Baby Einstein Is No Genius.

(Photo by antisocialtory, on Flickr.)

Honestly. Ensuring our child’s good health, happiness, kindness and compassion may well be our highest priorities, but wouldn’t we do all in our power to have the brightest, most talented, top-of-the-class kid? Or, at least, one who doesn’t have to struggle too hard to make the grade?

And here is where it gets really unfair. If we didn’t have enough issues to puzzle out as new parents with bleary-eyes and sleep-starved brains (like diapering with cloth or disposable, making breast or bottle feeding work, bed sharing or crib sleeping, and interpreting our baby’s cries), we are then presented with a torrent of persuasive, conflicting advice about how to help our babies become the quick thinkers and successful, highly motivated learners we hope they will be. No matter what choices we make, we are bound to have doubts.

A mom commented (on my post Baby, Interrupted - 7 Ways To Build Your Child’s Focus And Attention Span) that the information I share on my site has made her question the early learning programs she bought for her son. She asked what I thought she should do to utilize them. I suggested that she wait until her boy was 4 or 5, and then allow him to peruse the videos, flashcards, etc., if he was interested in doing so.

She replied:

“Hmm. Wait until he’s 4 or 5 years? For the math thing the whole idea of doing it now is because baby’s until 2.5 years are able to perceive true quantity and that makes it much easier for them to learn math. And when I look at how terrible I am at math, I don’t want him to miss this opportunity…

I like the idea of taking the middle path — to teach him what will benefit him to learn at an early age, and to leave the rest alone on the floor for him to examine if he’s interested.

Do you have any tips I should bear in mind to not affect his attention span negatively?”

This mommy’s worries about math, since she has struggled with the subject herself, make total sense. After all, being a parent is our golden opportunity to do better, to learn from our mistakes and correct them for our child (therefore ensuring not only our child’s success, but the evolutionary assent of our lineage!)

It is true that infants and toddlers begin to perceive quantity. They also learn fractions, addition and subtraction, even multiplication, division and geometry.  In recent studies reported in Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik’s New York Times article “Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think”, babies as young as eight months old demonstrated astonishing capacities for “statistical reasoning, experimental discovery and probabilistic logic” that allow them to “rapidly learn all about the particular objects and people surrounding them.”

But Gopnik warns, “Sadly, some parents are likely to take the wrong lessons from these experiments and conclude that they need programs and products that will make their babies even smarter. Many think that babies, like adults, should learn in a focused, planned way. So parents put their young children in academic-enrichment classes or use flashcards… “   Instead, “Infants and toddlers need plenty of open-ended play time to be able to build the brain synapses necessary for higher learning abilities.”

Babies relish the time to learn this way, naturally and organically, with joy, wonder, and all five of their senses. When infants and toddlers examine the patterns on a blanket or cotton scarf, mouth the shape of a teething ring, experiment with blocks, balls or plastic beads, stack cups, pour water, shovel sand, make mud pies, watch and interact with us or even just stare at corners of the ceiling they are stimulating neural connections that build a strong foundation for math and language skills.

Parents can help by giving simple acknowledgments. “Your bucket is ¾ full.” Or, “You gave me two blocks and you kept one.”

But interrupting a baby’s inborn desire to explore and discover to give a lesson in letters, numbers or reading is like painting a house before the foundation is built. It discourages him from working on what is really important, and wastes both our child’s time and ours.

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed observing babies naturally practicing math skills. In one of my parent/toddler classes, a 2 year old boy spent much of the 90 minutes each week repeating the task of fitting little plastic dolls into the opening of a huge Arrowhead water bottle. I sensed him counting inside his head with quiet concentration as each doll ‘plunked’ to the bottom of the bottle. 

One of my most flabbergasting moments ever as a parent was when my 4-year-old daughter was staring at a framed poster on our wall, “Les Animaux de La Ferme”. There are three vertical rows of different breeds of cows, five in each row. After a minute or two my daughter proclaimed. “Five by three is fifteen!”  (BTW, this same child just achieved a perfect score on her math SAT.)

Do we want our toddlers to learn how to use simple math and language symbols, or do we want them to truly understand mathematical concepts, develop their higher learning skills, be deep thinkers and creative problem solvers — discover who they are and what they are passionate about?

So, the short answer to this dear, caring mom’s question is: Any time we interrupt what an infant or toddler might be working on to “teach” him, we discourage focus and attention span. Attempting to plant seeds of knowledge in our babies inadvertently plants seeds of doubt.  How can our child believe that the activities he chooses are valuable, when we signal that we want him to do something more…or different?   

The truth is we don’t know where our children’s talents lie, but if we trust our baby, allow him to explore and experiment, and choose activities he is naturally drawn to, he will utilize the gifts he has to the fullest, and with great confidence. He may become that math whiz we hoped for…or something even cooler.

Learning programs for infants and toddlers like “Your Baby Can Read” are aggressively marketed to new parents and appeal to our most sincere instincts – to do what is best for our children and give them every advantage in life. The children in the promotional videos look so happy to be reading words (words that some cannot even speak yet!), and their parents are so proud. We naturally wonder, “Those people are teaching their toddlers to read? Am I failing my child? Will she fall behind before she even starts kindergarten?”

Parents can relax. Early learning gimmicks have been recycled for years, yet not one has ever been scientifically proven to enhance a child’s learning abilities (or increase intelligence, for that matter.) The reality is that we harm our children when we control and push forward their development, rather than facilitating and letting it happen. Infants and toddlers need time to follow their natural curiosity and interests, which can only happen when they are engaged in uninterrupted, self-directed play. So, when we give a baby reading lessons — or any kind of instruction — that child pays a steep price. She is deprived of the vastly more important, age-appropriate activities that prepare a foundation for true reading comprehension and for the higher levels of brain function in the future.

We all are born with an innate desire to explore, experiment and discover. Babies will find cognitive learning opportunities in the simplest environments as they work to make sense of the world. They are eager to spend time imagining, reasoning, developing formulas and testing them. Why does the ball roll more quickly on the wooden floor than it does on the rug? What makes the clouds move? Does the plastic ring fit around this bottle top? These kinds of early experiences ignite the neural pathways that lead to a strong and active mind.

So, why are we so ready to interrupt and squander this time — this precious window of accelerated development in our child’s life — by showing him a flash card that directs him to clap like a performing seal? We are certainly not helping him to develop his intellectual potential, and the ‘head start’ we imagine will quickly disappear by second or third grade.

We need dreamers, big-picture thinkers and creative problem-solvers to inherit our world, not machines programmed to memorize and mimic.

Furthermore, while a program like “Your Baby Can Read“ may train a baby to recognize words, it cannot teach him to comprehend more than the most basic ones. A child is not ready to learn letters, numbers or words when he has not had the opportunity to build a sensory foundation for what these symbols represent. “Reading comprehension is built on mental networks formed throughout childhood from real experiences with the world,” writes educator and brain researcher Jane Healey, PH.D., in her book, Your Child’s Growing Mind.

The mechanics of reading are not difficult for the average child to learn when he is ready to do so. Reading comes easily, but only when the timing is right, and children who are naturally interested in reading at an early age will teach themselves. One of my three children became a self-taught reader when she was four years old. Her desire to read was a wildfire that could not be contained. She still loves books, creative writing and the literature camp she has chosen to attend the last three summers. Reading is one of her personal passions, not something she does because it pleases her parents.

And our babies are driven to please their caregivers. Their basic survival depends upon our acceptance of them. We should use this power wisely and not abuse it. When we teach a baby something he is not choosing to learn on his own, we put him on course to ignore intrinsic motivation in favor of performing for others — namely us. The child distances himself further and further from his unique goals and passions. We must give our child unconditional acceptance and respond with the same amount of approval for all her accomplishments, big and small, to encourage her continued authenticity.

“When we instruct children in academic subjects at too early an age, we miseducate them; we put them at risk for short-term stress and long-term personality damage for no useful purpose. There is no evidence that such early instruction has lasting benefits, and considerable evidence that it can do lasting harm,” warns Dr. David Elkind in Miseducation.

As I sadly watched the testimonials from parents on the “Your Baby Can Read” site, I couldn’t help but wonder about the videos I wasn’t seeing: the ones where the children suddenly wake up years later and realize that their entire lives have been motivated by the need to please loved ones.

Then there are the children who do not succeed with the “Your Baby Can Read” program. They have disappointed their parents and find no joy in learning. Instead of learning naturally and joyously through play, they equate education with tension and failure…and they are only 3 years old.

Lastly, and most tragically, a baby who reads because it makes his parents happy is receiving the message — in his most important, intimate relationships — that his value is based on performance and accomplishments. The children I observed in the “Your Baby Can Read” videos were ecstatically soaking up the positive attention they were getting for being precocious readers. They seemed thrilled by the pride their parents exhibited. Do these parents respond enthusiastically when the child paints with water on the driveway? Do they show pride when the child buries his feet in the sand? Do they enjoy him when he picks up a ladybug or splashes in a mud puddle? The child can only wonder if he would be as appreciated and loved if he did not perform for his parents. His mud pies and skinned knees might not be enough.