The commercials look great. Toddlers, even babies as young as three months old, reading phrases from cue cards. Who wouldn’t want their child to get the kinds of advantages that reading before preschool might provide? But can programs like “Your Baby Can Read” really doing what they promise?
According to a recent Today Show investigation – no, they really aren’t.
“No,” Dr. Nonie Lesaux, a child development expert at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education told the Today Show. “They memorize what’s on those cue cards … It’s not reading.”
“It’s an extraordinary manipulation of facts,” said Dr. Maryanne Wolf, director of Cognitive Neuroscience at Tufts University.
“I think it’s misleading. I think it’s false, and I think it raises false expectations,” said Dr. Karen Hopkins, a developmental pediatrician at New York University’s Langone Medical Center.
According to all ten experts consulted by the Today Show, infants and toddlers can be taught to memorize and recognize written words, but they simply are not developed enough to read at the levels these commercials claim they can.
There are, of course, exceptions to every rule, like the toddler who read the word “kangaroo” on the Today Show in 2008. But, for the most part, children under four or five just aren’t ready to read.
When faced with the collective opinions of these experts, Dr. Robert Titzer, creator of ”Your Baby Can Read,” can only say that, “They’re all wrong.” But the self proclaimed infant learning expert (who actually has a graduate degree in “human performance,” the study of motor skills), failed to provide the research he promised to back his program up.
Instead of trying to force your baby to read for themselves, try reading to your child. You’ll make your child a better reader when they’re ready to read for themselves and score some quality snuggle time to boot.
