The funny thing is that the youngest (my daughter) was the one who crawled and walked the quickest. Unfortunately she gained motor skills before she had the neurological maturity to deal with them. Which is how she managed to tumble down a half flight of stairs as an infant, and we needed to make sure to be very vigilant when she walked at nine months. Sometimes it is not a good thing when a baby does something early!

After her tumble down half a flight of stairs the gates went up, but her brothers would leave them open (they were three and five years old). Fortunately after she was six months old she had a habit of giggling when she started to crawl up the stairs, so I was able to catch her.

In case you are curious: she is a perfectly normal eighteen year old. She is will be applying to the linguistics program at the local university next winter (she is starting there next month, and will be taking Swedish, Beginning Linguistics and a writing class). Before she graduated from from high school she learned two languages (Japanese and French) and is only a few credits short of being a college junior. And all I ever did was read to her, and occasionally speak to her in my very limited Spanish and some basic tourist French.

She apparently inherited something from my dad, an Army linguist who seemed to be able to learn a language just by hearing it (he is fluent in about three, and knows at least four more). I was yelled at in may languages as I grew up, and learned to not repeat anything if I did not know what it meant. It didn’t help that between the Yiddish and Chinese phrases he threw at us that he also made up phrases. A habit I used when I had young children, by using “furglesnorp” and other made up words instead of certain swear words.

I know I would have been one of those parents pushing my kid to read early, but things did not go as I expected. My oldest child has some significant issues just learning to speak his native language. As I learned about speech/language disorders, I also learned that there are developmental milestones that need to be passed before certain things can be learned. This is what I learned by reading The Hurried Child by David Elkind.

Seriously: childhood should be a journey, not a competitive race. Let the babies be babies, and the toddlers be toddlers. Take delight in how they discover the world, because before you know it they grow up and move on (and now we are paying for college tuition for three kids!).

And there is definitely evidence that children who read early do better in school.

Citations, please.

I ask because a couple of the boys in my son’s special ed. preschool had hyperlexia, which is kind of an autism variant. Both sets of parents were delighted, but then the deficits of other areas of development became apparent at around age three or more.

One of them could recite all of the dialog of the movie Totoro, but was not big on social interaction. He spent the bulk of my son’s fifth birthday party walking around reciting Beatrice Potter. Well, when one has a special needs child, you tend to have very interesting birthday parties.

They should all be in their early twenties. It peaked my interest because I met these boys shortly after Glenn Doman was pushing his “better baby” books. It was quite an eye-opener to learn about the draw backs to certain precocious behavior.

I agree with some of the points you made in your article – that this program is not going to miraculously create a “baby genius” or put your child five grades ahead of his classmates in school. If a parent purchases this product with the thought in mind that they are going to stimulate and discover an Einstein in their 9-month-old, they’re obviously going to be disappointed.

But on the other hand, I wouldn’t write this product off completely. It has its place if one’s expectations are realistic. So the question lurking in parents’ minds of whether or not this product is worth the money is ultimately going to be answered on an individual basis, based on a collection of their own data and goals.

Personally I see the program as offering creative stimulation – something my 16-month-old with whom I just began using it, craves. She quickly bores with toys. She would prefer carefully studying how I complete some task around the house to playing with toys. The one thing she NEVER tires of, though, is books. She is absolutely fascinated and spellbound when you pull a book out. And you can read it over and over to her.

Observing her carefully, I realized that she is bored because she does not have enough to challenge her. She loves to observe and learn. So I’m trying to provide opportunities for her to do so. Many babies might be happy hugging a doll and playing with a rattle, but this would bore my little girl to death. So I do puzzles with her, sign language, anything to stimulate creative learning and keep her engaged.

And the “Your Baby Can Read” program is one of the things I have turned to to help me out. We only started it yesterday. But I can see that it’s doing for her what I need it to do: it is challenging, engaging and stimulating her learning skills. I can see she concentrates very hard; she’s paying attention and trying to grasp what is being taught. She gets very serious and wrapped up in it. It captures her attention. And I really do think she’s going to learn. So for me, this program is worth the money because it is doing what I need it to do for her.

In our case, this is proving to be a worthwhile product (and since she loves books so well anyway, why not learn to read a few words – even if they’re only memorized)? Personally I prefer a more phonetic approach to learning to read, but even this whole word approach will be helpful, because as I see it, if she gains some confidence in learning to read a few words and really enjoys it, it can only serve to push her forward in her reading skills when she gets a little older and we actually begin studying phonics.

Besides, even just learning to memorize is a worthwhile stimulator for a child. A puzzle engages a childs brain and stimulates learning as they try to put it together. And in so doing, they are learning a great deal. So too, challenging their little brains through memory work is, at least in my opinion, a good thing to do, as what they are learning now in terms of HOW to approach problems and solve them, and to develop a good memory, can only aid them in the future since they will be used to exercising their senses, and demonstrating confidence, perseverance and self-discipline in meeting and overcoming challenges, because they have gained the required skills to do so.

I am a neurologist at a well known USA hospital, and the mother of a 15 month old boy. This program has really helped my child’s language development and is teaching him to read.

He has been doing Your Baby Can Read for 8 months.
Nothing at all happened for the first 3 months into the program.
4 months – he could read one word.
5 months – he could read 2-3 of the words mentioned in the DVDs.
7 months – he could read about 20-30 of the words.
8 months – he can pretty much read all of them – which is maybe 75 words I guess.
He shows me by doing the action associated with the word – eg: touching his head, or by pointing to the correct picture / object for other words eg: gorrilla.
Progress has exploded over the last 4 weeks.

He knows 15 body parts due to the program, which is way ahead of average according to the Denver II develomental test. He can correctly identify many pictures (eg: lion) which he has also learned from the program. Again, this is way ahead of average language development.
He can actually read many more words than he can pronounce at this point, and interestingly over the last few days has begun speaking some of the words he sees in print aloud for the first time – some are the first time he has ever said that word.

I don’t know – perhaps his language would be this advanced without the program, though I doubt it. What I do know, is that his reading would not be.

At the infant level all learning is done by memorizing.

Secondly, you can learn to read just fine without phonics at all. I was taught to read by sight reading and knowledge of the alphabet alone, and only learned phonics when I was mature enough to read most of “The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe” and needed it only to spell out words which were long and complex.

Therefore, when I saw this program I knew it was right for my child, even if there is no research to support it. I do not see any harm in this kind of early learning. My son loves showing off what he knows. Also, while there is no evidence it will make him smarter or perform better academically, it will likely not hurt him, and probably will help, so I will keep going, and encourage everyone else to do it too. And lastly, it actually allayed a lot of the anxiety I would have otherwise had about his development, as I watched him be ahead of milestone all the time.