Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Infomercial: Your Baby Can Read - your thoughts...

My problem with programs like this is the opportunity cost. If a child is spending time being drilled on reading at an earlier-than-natural time for that child, then the child is missing out on the "sweet spot" for other learning that s/he is ripe for. For what? So that the child can be Mommy's little trained seal to show off for friends?

I want kids' learning to be on their specific timetable, with an understanding of the range of normal human development (and the understanding that it *is* a range, with outliers who are different from the norm). But I don't want kids' learning to be shoehorned into *any* adult timetable--either one that's faster than is appropriate for that particular child or one that's slower than is appropriate for that particular child.

When this topic comes up, I always think of the advice I read years ago about toilet training. It said that for most parents, if they started training at age 1 and worked daily on it they'd have a child who was trained at around age 3. Or they could wait to start until age 3...and have a child who was trained at around age 3.

Seems applicable here.

ITA. Except that I'm not sure your toilet training analogy really works. My DD started before she was a year old...because I couldn't bring myself to ignore her when she started signing "potty" right before she peed. She wasn't nighttime trained until she was about 2 1/2, but I don't think that the time she spent prior to that working on that skill was wasted. (But I do agree that for most kids there is no point in starting early. As I said, I only did it because she initiated it, and not because I had an agenda or expectation.)

Ha, I read the subject for this thread as "Your baby can read your thoughts"-- now THAT would be impressive.

LOL!!! Good one!
Anyone have opinions on these programs "muddying the waters" in with educators for truly gifted kids?

I have also seem the commercial.
I think the your baby can read system teaches babies to memorize common words by watching a set of DVD's. Sounds expensive and boring to me!
I don't see how it could harm your child, but I also don't think that the TV is the best learning tool for babies. Babies require a lot of physical interaction, that you just can't get from a TV.
I think that emotional developement is more important, especially during the first few years of life.
And besides TV has enough power over our children already.

Personally, I think it CAN harm your child... as you said, it's boring, it involves TV, also couldn't the child begin to feel, as Kriston said, like a trained seal... and only valued for her "tricks?"

In reading about the infomercial, I wonder if the kids just learned how to associate a pattern with an object. So, maybe they could recognize "CAT" but not "cat" or "cat" in a slightly stylized font.

I agree with Kriston's point about possibly missing a sweet spot for other development. We taught two of our kids to read because they explicitly asked us to. The other one was less interested so we left it until mid-K, when he got more interested.

DD4 had figured out the idea already (eg, one day she said "I want to learn how to read!" and so I wrote CAT and she read it and then a couple other words with my friend looking on saying, "If I hadn't seen this with my own eyes...."

DD isn't self-taught like some of the kids on this board. Yet she sure can be close to voracious with her reading sometimes. I think this goes back to the desire to read thing: if they want to read, they will.

Val

Well, I don't think your example undermines my (mostly humorous) analogy. I think your example actually supports my point that it's good to work on the child's timetable. I'd say that your daughter was outside the norm on that 3yo average. You have a GT toileter!

But seriously, I think it would have been silly to hold your DD back in toileting when she was telling you that she was ready. You didn't decide she was ready, she did. That's the key. Regardless of whether a child is ahead or behind the curve, I think that's how to deal with learning.

But that's just my opinion. Feel free to laugh and ignore.

My description of potty training was meant to support your other points. I totally agreed with everything you wrote, except to the extent that it seemed like you were saying that parents should decide when to toilet train children rather than letting the kids decide for themselves.

Ah. I see. No, I am just anti-pushing, just as much as I am anti-holding-back.

Same page now.