Teaching Babies to Read

Reading is a complex skill which builds upon a number of other skills. For example, reading is in part a visual skill, in that it involves the ability to discriminate letters and words. But it also involves the muscular control that allows the child to explore a page from left to right and from top to bottom. It is also an auditory skill that requires the child to discriminate the basic sounds of his or her native language and eventually to begin to associate these sounds with the printed word. Last but not least, reading is a cognitive skill because it requires understanding and interpretation.

The research on reading is quite abundant and quite consistent in showing that this skill most effectively taught only after the child has attained ability to learn and to follow rules, usually the age range of five to seven. This is true because it takes years for children to acquire the many pre-reading skills required to profit from formal reading instruction. The cross-cultural research is quite dramatic in this regard. In Scandinavian countries and in Russia, reading is usually not taught until the age of six or seven. Children in these countries exhibit few reading problems. In France, with state supported preschools, reading is taught at age three and 30 percent of French children have reading problems. A recent comprehensive book on reading relates it to brain development as well as experience, but comes to the same conclusions. (Wolf 2007)

Despite the research, there are those who insist that parents can teach their infants to read, if they will only buy the magical system they have to offer. One of the first to make this kind of offer was Glen Doman (Doman 1967) with his "How to Teach Your Baby to Read". He argued that because the brain is growing rapidly during the first years this is the time to teach reading and math. (This claim always puzzles me. As a gardener one of the first rules I learned was never to prune during the growing season). Although Doman, and now his daughter (Doman 2007) have been selling the program for more than forty years, they have no follow up studies to demonstrate its effectiveness. Others (e.g., “Monki See, Monki Doo”) (Author 2007) have gotten on the same bandwagon and make the same bogus claims, e.g., “ A one year old learns better than a two year old.” Those who sell these materials offer no research or other evidence in support of their arguments. The purveyors of infant learning to read products build on parent anxieties to sell a product that is likely to do more harm than good.

The best preparation for learning to read is a language rich environment. This environment is created when you sing, talk and read to your child beginning in infancy. (Copas from: http://www.justaskbaby.com/blogs/professor-elkind/teaching-babies-to-read)