You Can't Teach A Baby To Read

It's not unheard of for preschoolers to teach themselves how to read. In fact, our little school probably sends 2-3 kids off to kindergarten each year who are full-on reading. I wrote before about a boy who taught himself to both read and write so that he would not be breaking the letter of one of our school rules. A couple years ago one of our 2-year-olds began sounding out words he saw around the classroom. Another child entered kindergarten last year having tested out at an 8th grade reading level, a year above the national average for adults. That said, we have never attempted to teach a preschooler to read.

So, it's true that preschoolers can read, the common element in every case being that they've done it on their own, all part of satisfying their curiosity about the world the way other kids might excel at athletics or social skills or working puzzles. And every time we have an early reader at Woodland Park her parents insist they've done nothing special: "She was just born that way."

Some preschoolers learn to read, but the vast majority do not. And no one has ever taught a preschooler to read who wasn't already teaching himself.

That, of course, doesn't stop charlatans from making false claims, playing on the insecurities of new parents, and particularly on those with disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, to convince them to purchase expensive video-based programs that purport to teach babies to read. Recently, one of the biggest pushers of this nonsense, a company called Your Baby Can, producers of the Your Baby Can Read! video series, shut its doors due to the costs of fighting a Federal Trade Commission investigation initiated by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood for falsely claiming their product taught babies to read. The nail in the coffin was this Today Show piece in which every child development expert they asked agreed: No, these babies are not reading. They are memorizing. 

According to the CCFC:

This is an important victory for families. Research links infant screen time to sleep disturbances, attention problems, and delayed language acquisition, as well as problems in later childhood such as poor school performance and childhood obesity. The American Academy of Pediatrics, and other public health organizations, recommend no screen time for infants and toddlers. But if parents followed Your Baby Can Read!’s viewing instructions, their baby would have watched more than 200 hours by the age of nine months.  

To this I will add that there is absolutely no credible evidence that learning to read early has any bearing on a child's future academic life, which is also true for early walking, early talking, or early anything. Early is not better when it comes to education: it's just "early." We can take joy in it as parents, of course, as the Woodland Park community does, but it's no cause to start filling out the Harvard admissions forms. 

(If you like CCFC’s campaign to stop the deceptive marketing of baby media as educational, please consider a contribution to their Action Fund. Your gift will support efforts to keep companies honest and babyhood screen-free.)

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