My Baby Can Read Program: From a speech-language pathologist’s point of view, is this program useful?

Yes, if your goal is to teach your baby to read early, then I think that you can accomplish your goal with the My Baby Can Read program. It appears to be effective and interesting to babies. It can keep their interest and attention.

See this link for a review: http://www.theopinionatedparent.com/2007/04/13/my-baby-can-read/

However, I have some concerns: If you do this program, you are using up valuable time and energy to teach what is basically a splinter skill – almost a “human trick”. From an SLP perspective, the most important life skill is communication, not impressing others with early learned skills.

Instead, an SLP would concentrate on teaching social skills at this age, like taking turns passing a ball back and forth, making funny sounds and faces, labeling things the child is interested in, and looking at a caregiver’s face for shared enjoyment. Most learning happens just by watching the caregiver while he/ she goes about her business and talks to the baby, involving the baby where possible. If your baby has already mastered these social skills, then there would be no concern with adding reading. If your child doesn’t have social skills, or isn’t strong in her ability to connect to important adults in her life, then it would be better to concentrate on teaching these skills. If social skills are missed in babyhood, it’s possible that the child will not learn how to trust and connect to people, and that is a harder one to catch up on later.

What would be the benefit of learning to read as a baby?

A whole world opens up when a child learns to read. Literacy is like a key to open an amazing number of doors to worlds and experiences that would not be possible without it. If the child learns to love books at any early age, and experiences the success of learning to read as a baby could be life changing.

photo: chad_k

Is it helpful over the long term, to teach my baby to read now? Am I missing out on an important opportunity for my baby if I don’t teach him to read now?

It could be helpful to teach your baby to read. But most research on early reading shows that children with a good literacy foundation will learn to read and will probably catch up to their friends who learned to read as babies. A good foundation to give your baby now is reading to him, singing to him, exposing him to music, and exposing him to a variety of stimulating environments.

Ask a Speech Language Pathologist: At what age can babies learn to read?

It depends on the baby. There are a lot of different factors involved. If the baby is simply sight reading, then she should be able to do this once she has developed a visual memory. For example, even if you are not doing a reading program, the baby might memorize the cover of his favorite book and associate it with the story that he likes.

Question: My 4 1/2 year old has speech delays and he has been improving a lot in speech therapy. however he has been stuttering for a few weeks now. Should i tell him to slow down, or just ignore it?

Answer: If it has just started then the best thing to do is ignore it & treat it like it’s no big deal. but be very positive about his speech. Say encouraging things like, “You are so good at your new sounds” etc. Let him know with actions and body language that you will give him as much time as he needs to say what he needs to say.

it is normal for kids to stutter any time in the preschool years, it’s just how long it goes and how severe it is that determines whether they need speech therapy for it.

Just a funny: My DD stuttered off and on for over a year and it cleared up on its own. the funny thing is that she “backwards stuttered” for lack of a better term. Instead of repeating first sounds I l-l-l-like cookies she repeated the end part of the word “I like-ike-ike-ike cookies”. I’m a pediatric speech therapist and in 11 years i’ve never seen another child do this!