You and Your Baby Can Read

One of the most important life skills that people can learn is reading. Without reading it is much harder to succeed in Science, Social Studies, Mathematics, and the arts, as well as at a potential job. The earlier one learns to read the better, some would say. Is teaching an infant to read too early for its normal development? Teaching your baby to read could have some advantages for the child later in life, but are there also disadvantages? Is a program like Your Baby can Read good for a child’s development?

Because the majority of a human’s brain function develops in the first 5 years of life, and a baby learns through stimulation, this is when a child picks up languages the easiest, which is why children in bilingual homes learn both languages early in life. Could this be the best time to teach your baby to read. This is where the Your Baby Can Read program can help these children develop the skills needed for reading at an early age.

The developer for the Your Baby Can Read program, Dr. Robert Titzer, started his program because he is of the opinion that if you wait until the kids are in school to teach them to read, you have missed that window of opportunity.

His program has won many awards for the methods that it uses to help children develop their early language skills through the interaction of the child with the television, books, and games so that the learning experience is fun for everyone.

However, there is another school of thought that says that this Your Baby Can Read program does not do exactly what it promises because there are more proven methods of teaching a child to read. This program teaches through a concept known as the whole word approach, which was quite popular in the late 80’s and early 90’s and required the rote memorization of words to gain the reading understanding. Now, however, research is showing that a combination of phonics and whole word is the best way to teach children to read. Those who would criticize this program would say that just memorization by association is not really reading, but children need to learn to sound out words a sound at a time. Other critics would say that when children are being forced to learn to read it can lead to negative experiences and that their brains should be allowed to develop on their own through the time that you spend showing love to your child and stimulating them through their environment, instead of constant reading drills that the Your Baby Can Read program does. It may be possible to use this program with another program that emphasizes the importance of learning phonics.

Most early learning scholars, however, would agree that no matter what the age of the child, it is important that they be stimulated early for their brains to develop properly so that they can eventually learn how to form words and read while they are still young. How young? No one knows for sure.