Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Wow, I don't even know what to say...

Check out this website I found while googling suzuki violin and little kids

http://www.brillbaby. com/ (remove the space, I don't want to link)

There is a forum where a poster is worried when 23mo old son only recognizes pictures from the flash cards and no words or another asking if she should stop showing her 6mo old some learning to read DVDs as the baby is not interested.

Oh my! I think some people take things a bit extreme!!

At 6 months old my DS would play with toys some and me more, I never would have even considered flashcards or a tv reading program! Now at 6 months when playing with toys he was even then trying to figure out how they worked but that was his doing not mine!

Confession time -

I have done some of this stuff. I like to read everything on a topic so when I was pregnant I read EVERYTHING available on babies and their development, including the Doman books. The one on physical development was kind of interesting. I don't remember much now, but I always encouraged my kids to walk A LOT and they slept on their tummies from birth (the were strong big babies and our ped knew).

I also did flash cards with dots on them because this was supposed to give them some intuitive sense of quantities. Makes sense to me. It's not something I spent more that ten hours on in total, but the idea seems reasonable.

It did have value because I learned that any time my baby started to fuss (like in line at the bank) all I had to do was stick something with graphics in front of him and I would get another couple of minutes of quiet. Credit card application? Fascinating!

I just don't get it. It strikes me as immeasurably sad to waste the magic of those early years on something so regimented and parent driven. I peeked at the site, and the forum has over 34,000 members! That's a lot of flashcards!

What a two dimensional world to live in!

I have to confess to at first buying into and, unfortunately, buying a few of the Baby Einstein videos. But, then my better more educated self prevailed. Babies should NOT be watching TV!

After I got a hold of myself, I was pretty adamant about flashy toys and tv/computer games. I remember my mother chastising me because I was not allowing Jonas to play with the tv/game system that she bought him. He was always attracted to 'real' things and manipulating nature and natural objects. Now, she is supportive of my parenting style and my intentions - but at the time it was odd to feel like I was being a bad parent because I was not letting him play video games!?!

When I gave my son a magnifying glass in his Easter basket at age 5, we went to the park and rather than playing with plastic easter eggs, he was looking at the leaves and the flowers and he said - just about everything has little holes in it and the leaves look like they have veins. Flash cards would leave out a whole world of discovery!

"Learning can only happen when a child is interested. If he's not interested, it's like throwing marshmallows at his head and calling it eating."

~ Barbara Lamping

I have seen something similar to this, in fact, it might be the same thing. The Your Baby Can Read DVD infomercials and some posts about it on another board. A while back when the Einstein DVDs had to refund money because their marketing promised smarter babies; a wave of articles were published about this new wave of parenting and showing that they don't have a real advantage, using the "they are even out by the 3rd grade" criteria. I ponder if this is true and also if the site mentioned in the original post and the DVD I just referenced takes it even further than anything Disney came up with? Either way, it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. Why can't parents play with their children and read books? And I'm not just talking read books to their children but also to themselves because it sets a good example and when the children are raised in an environment where the parents are readers there is a higher chance the child will be a strong reader.

I guess I am for a more old school approach. This isn't saying my DD doesn't have toys but truthfully she would be quite content with her stuffed animals and books. She has such an imagination that she doesn't need electronics ... her animals come to life.

My kids have come across the infomercials on t.v.. They think they're really awful: )

DS8 saw an ad for these. He asked if they were real. My response: kids who can/are ready to learn to read at that age probably don't need the programs, and most kids--even most HG+ kids--would be better served by doing other things with their time when they're babies.

I always like to stress the opportunity cost. If kids are staring at videos or flashcards as babies, they're not doing all the other things they could be doing with that time, having all the experiences they could be having. And if the other things they could be doing are more appropriate for where they are developmentally, then trying to push reading too soon can actually hurt them.

Instead of holding up a flashcard, why not count pieces of cereal as they eat them? Instead of plopping them in front of a video about reading, why not read to them and point to the words and ask them what they think will happen next? These things seem more sensible to me. And they're free!

Oh, I found this one particularly entertaining! Well, and parts of it a bit scary!